What about thaym?
Old Firm fans drowning in a sea of moral turpitude .. trying to prove their superiority at the point of a primary school crayon
Somewhere in a darkened room on the sixth floor of Hampden, to the lonely soundtrack of the chinking of empties, the SPFL match secretary is trying to work out how to play the post-split Old Firm game in February.
Because if he leaves it any later? World War III beckons, if Donald Trump hasn’t already blown for kick-off.
While the rest of the world is taking up the Decade Challenge on social media as a means to show how much they have changed in 10 years, the Old Firm sides are determined to prove they haven’t moved an inch.
“Here’s a picture of us in January 2010, two institutions supposed to represent the best of Scottish football but so dysfunctional we actually portray its worst.
“And here we are in January 2020… can’t believe how much we’ve… er…”
The infantile nature of last week’s scramble to the moral low ground has been embarrassing for both.
They’re supposed to be the adults in the relationship yet they’re reducing big issues like racism and sectarianism, issues worthy of grownup debate and even more grown-up action from them both, into tit-for-tat point-scoring, as if the binary of we’re good/they’re bad is all that matters, not actually the root cause of their problems.
Rangers should’ve just shut the doors last Sunday, headed off on holiday and let Celtic stew in the broth of frustrated bile rising around them.
They had won the derby at a canter, outplayed Celtic to the point of instilling major doubts in the heads of the vast majority of a support that, never mind 10-in-a-row, nine may yet be a pipe dream.
Questions were being asked and the Hoops’ failure would have been the agenda for the week – personnel, tactics, the complicity of their board sitting on a cash mountain instead of spending like drunken sailors to send Rangers back into the rear-view mirror.
Justified or not for a club who have won 10 trophies in a row and proven themselves more resilient than a coat of Hammerite, Celtic found themselves on the back foot.
Yet out came Rangers’ statement, defiantly demanding VAR and justice for Alfredo Morelos – and all of a sudden you give them something to circle the wagons around.
A Celtic spokesman responds, saying never mind us, what about THAYM?
What about their missiles, abuse of Leigh Griffiths and their Celtic Boys Club filth? Why legitimise them?
Once again, the big- boy topics are shoved to the side in favour of a Trumpian circus. Rangers’ inference that the entirety of Scottish football is some kind of unwelcoming hotbed of xenophobes and racists when it c omes to Morelos is a hamfisted way of making an argument that may have elements of merit but is blown out of the water with such a numbnuts generalisation.
You see it perpetuated with the clip on social media on Friday night of someone shouting “orange b*****d” at him from the window of a car, laughably blamed on the ‘xenophobic media coverage’ of their hero.
How stupid do you have to be not to realise it’s the polar opposite?
The most pitifully parochial, tragically localised and brain-dead abuse possible of a black Colombian Catholic.
Likewise, the over- reaction to Morelos’ throat-slitting gesture has been laughable in the context of what’s gone before in a fixture hardly renowned for its genteel restraint.
Immature for sure, but that’s what he is. A kid with a lot to learn. He has a host of terrific qualities and a big heart judging by his charity foundation. But Morelos has some serious disciplinary deficiencies, none of which are related to his nationality or skin colour.
And yes, he takes stick. Some of it, no doubt, will be racist in nature – we’d be burying our heads in the sand to say it doesn’t exist when it so obviously does . Ask Celtic’s Scott Sinclair.
It ’s also interesting to see the reaction of Celtic fans trying to defend their position by saying the abuse the striker takes is because he’s a wee nark on the park.
It’s the same argument they refused to accept when it was said about Neil Lennon, his detractors apparently all anti- Irish racists and bigots. Surely you can’t have it both ways? As ever, these debates are more layered and nuanced than the good/ evil axis of simplicity applied by these two supports.
When you get people using software to isolate single voices in a crowd of 60,000 that end up proving, ha, the only audible epithet used against Morelos wasn’t in fact racist but just the pseudosectarian ‘ hun b*****d’, that somehow makes it better?
They’re both drowning themselves in a sea of moral turpitude, trying to prove their superiority at the point of a primary school crayon.
Meanwhile, poor Iain Blair is back at SPFL HQ scratching his head.
This title race is going to the wire, no question. Steven Gerrard has found an edge missing in previous seasons and Celtic’s January and February is a tougher gig than their rivals.
So when it comes down to the split? It was embarrassing enough watching them trying to tap-dance on the head of a pin in their bid to avoid any meaning to a meeting between them when Celtic were a dozen points ahead.
They were desperate to reduce their flagship fixture to a sideshow. This time, the clubs will be neck and neck and there will be no escape.
And none of what has been said in the past week will help take it anywhere other than DEFCON 1.