A low point, and it’s time to act

With apologies to St Mirren and Dons’ fans, there is only one major issue in Scottish football this week. We have a good product on the park and one of the most competitive title races for years, the World Cup to look forward to, but still the same old issues off the field. Sometimes we think Scottish football is moving forward in and then the next minute/last weekend we get a reality check.

Last Sunday was a low point in the season.  When the quarter final cup tie between Rangers and Celtic ended, we saw fans from both sides pouring onto pitch and they weren’t there to exchange friendly greetings.

The basic fact - the thing that would normally have led the headlines - is that Celtic beat Rangers on penalties to edge into the Scottish cup semi-finals. But it was the scenes that followed that made the headlines.  As this was a Scottish Cup game, Celtic supporters were allocated the Broomloan Road End.  The 7,500 ticked allocation was a return to the way things were pre-2018. It was after trouble at that time that the Celtic allocation was reduced. Both clubs have reduced away tickets for each other in the years since then, which has perhaps helped diminish the likelihood of scenes like we saw on Sunday.  Despite attempts to apportion blame, the fact is that some fans of both clubs behaved badly, and some are now in police custody as a result.   That’s not the image we want to present to the world as we head off to the World Cup.

Neither club responded immediately. In fact, it took till today for one to break ranks, when Rangers put out a statement which does 'unequivocally condemn' the disorder at the game on Sunday.  I can only presume there have been some fairly terse conversations between both Celtic and Rangers and the SFA.  By the time you are reading this Celtic may have responded. We await the result of the SFA review of the incidents at this game with interest.

It's very important to note that not all fans behave this way and that many fans do good work within their clubs, supporting food banks, helping raise money for women’s teams, etc. However, there is also an ugly side which impacts the experience for all fans. It’s also important to note that it’s not just the Old Firm fans who can behave like idiots by fighting and lighting pyros. Today, Johnstone Burgh, a sixth-tier club, posted on social media that they are banning face-covering at matches and that they have had ‘issues with local ultra groups.’   They are not the first club to post warnings about this and I doubt they will be the last.

My question is, why do we wait for incidents to happen and then re-act? We’ve seen an increasing number of incidents at grounds all over the country for some years now. Antisocial behaviour like we witnessed at the weekend paints our game in the worst possible light. That said, it does now seem like a Rubicon was crossed at the weekend.  Ordinary, decent fans, who are the majority by the way, do not want our game marred by the kind of things we saw at the weekend. How the football authorities respond is crucial for how Scottish football is perceived by society in our country and across the world and, most importantly, by the majority of fans who rightly condemn such behaviour.

Michael McEwan, Ops Team, The SFU.