Old Firm day on Twitter is an explosion of profanity
Keyboard cretins must look in the mirror
I opened my laptop last Sunday morning and it was the first message I saw on my Twitter account.
“Ur a dirty biased b*****d,” it said – except the last word was completed in full.
On Old Firm day, social media is always like an explosion in an expletives factory.
But I’m sharing this one to lend greater understanding to a growing problem.
The profanity that greeted me will not be the subject of a long, drawn- out complaint here and I’m not making a public appeal for sympathy.
If you accept payment for giving your opinion on football matters in this country, in print or on radio, you must understand there are two consequences.
Income Tax and malice.
And if you participate in social media you must acknowledge it is, in part, home to the kind of people you would have hurriedly crossed the road to avoid in the days before the invention of the worldwide web.
I agreed, a few years ago, to become a human guinea pig in order to find out how someone of an age to receive the State Pension every month would be received on Twitter.
I had said, coincidentally, in last weekend’s column that I had subsequently gained in excess of 50,000 followers of disparate disposition towards me.
How disparaterate was succinctly summedmed up by the early-morningning message about my alleged lack of impartiality.
I freely admit it,t, I am biased.
I’m 71 years old and severely biaseded i n favour off becoming 72 in November.
Other than that? I’ve had one Covid-19 vaccination. I ’m awaiting word on when I get the next jab.
If you think the outcome of any football match is of greater importance to me than the preservation of my or those near and dear me,, then yyou aren’t p playing wwith a full dedeck. As someone much m ore famous fa than th me said a few days ago, I say whatw I think and I am at peace withi my own conscience. The reason for bringing up social media abuse as it applies to a white person who is not a professional footballer is simply to highlight what the game is up against while life, to trying to protect black people who are professional footballers.
The foul-mouthed message I received is an everyday example of what is out there in the anonymous world of the keyboard cretins.
I spoke to Marvin Bartley on the radio last Monday night.
It was the day he was brought on to the SFA’s Equality and Diversity Advisory Board.
I’ve never met Bartley but you could hear his voice trembling with emotion as he spoke about racism’s grip on the game after what happened to Rangers’ Glen Kamara in the Europa League tie against Slavia Prague.
But Shane Duffy isn’t black. He’s an Irishman who plays on loan at
Celtic and he’s recently had to withstand the hurt of having his late father’s death mocked on social media.
What happened to Kamara at Ibrox was an affront TO decency.
What happened when Celtic’s captain Scott Brown walked the length of the field to commiserate with Kamara before last Sunday’s derby was the epitome OF decency.
Out s i d e t he g r ou nd , meanwhile, hundreds of police officers had been deployed in case rival fans ignored the pleas from both clubs not to congregate and create a public order and public health risk.
Not long after the game a teenager was arrested because of online abuse directed towards Rangers’ Alfredo Morelos.
The game, in the shape of UEFA, the SFA or bodies l ike the Equality and Diversity Advisory Board, can only do so much.
As Scotland captain Andy Robertson said, UEFA wield the rea l power in t erms of punishments that are more in keeping with natural justice for those who racially abuse fellow professionals.
The authorities can highlight the problem – and others that have nothing to do with racism – but society also has to change for the better.
No one, so far as I can see, has occupancy of the moral high ground here.
As the great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson put it : “People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”
In other words, a lot of people need to take a look in the mirror.