Increase the peace - bin rags like these! (Part 3)

Every World Cup or Euro championship is like a holiday for me and I often find myself dreading a return to the small-mindedness of domestic fare. I’ve never LIVED away from Scotland but I did have a three-week holiday in Canada in the late nineties and found myself becoming more and more absorbed in the World Series baseball with every passing night in a sports bar. While loving foreign cultures, I’d always hated the idea of living in a non-footballing country, yet here I was learning the rules, going down the Toronto Sky-Dome to watch the Blue Jays and cheering home runs. It finally proved to me that the need for a sporting allegiance was universal for a certain personality-type and that the particular sport or team we supported was nothing more than an accident of birth.

Why is that last statement something we have to whisper? Why are we not allowed to admit the sheer randomness of where we’re born and who we support?? I know I need food only to live but it won’t ever stop me loving kebabs or hating prawn cocktail. Self-awareness doesn’t have to change yer instincts. So many footie fans can’t juggle the reality of fandom with the reality of real-life. Believing, for ninety minutes, that all the guys wearing the same colours as you are yer mates and all the ones in the away end are your rivals is the equivelant of suspending yer disbelief for an hour and a half at the cinema. We don’t leave a screening of “Star Wars” thinking Darth Vader is REALLY about to blow up the planet before we can catch the bus hame fae the pictures so why should we leave a fitbaw stadium thinking, for example, the Hearts fans really do live in slums and think “a dead rat is a treat”??

Luckily, I firmly believe most Old Firm fans instinctively know where these lines are drawn - even if we can’t admit this to ourselves. I found myself recently telling a friend up The Back of The Govan that if Sellik won the league at Ibrox I’d be round the Broomloan looking for a scrap after the game … that I just wouldn’t be able to let it go. UTTER BOLLOX!!! I shop in the same supermarket as Joos Valgaeren - I sometimes see him three or four times a week - he’s often right in front or behind me in the checkout queue. If I was as MADLY ANTI-SELLIK as I feel I am during an Old Firm game then I’d have smacked him long ago … even if it did mean a certain kicking for Mr Wet Paper Bag here!! Nah - I haven’t even given the guy a dirty look - not even a second glance anymore. Becuase it’s just not what I’m like - it’s certainly not what Valgaeren deserves - or my family!! - and it’d be nothing to do with SUPPORTING RANGERS - it’s just not how the vast majority of us are when we’re away from the football stadium. It’s too boring for The Daily Record to report that, though!

Mesage to all Bluenoses, all Tic fans, all FITBAW fans: Please don’t let the tabloids dictate why and how you love your team and please don’t let them be the sole arbiters of who and what should be despised … and to what degree. Football’s for love and enjoyment - abuse and spite will always come into it to make it a wee bit juicier but HATE and VIOLENCE is for small-minded twats with severe personal problems.

If anyone needs further convincing about the ONE HUNDRED PER-CENT MALICIOUS SMALL-MINDEDNESS of The Daily Record, they need look no further than some of the front-page headlines over the last year. Some of the stories regarding genuinely terrible events have been deemed unworthy of publication unless they can be incorporated into a fitbaw-and-TV mind-set. It’s truly horrific and I’d advise anyone of a sensitive nature NOT to read on. No jokes, here, folks - I find the following quite distressing myself and only want to bring it to your attention so we can stop people believeing the FILTH spouted by the tabloids just because it’s a football story. Filth which will lead to more violence and mayhem and for which fitbaw fans suffer - NOT the papers which encourage it:

In Airdrie or Coatbridge last year a young girl was raped by a group of young men. Quite the most horrific act I can possibly imagine. She happened to be wearing a Celtic strip at the time. The Record front page headline was “Celtic Girl Raped”!

That someone had suffered such a life-shattering ordeal was not enough - the sick Bas*rds had to report it in an “Old Firm light”.

Last week another young girl tragically died as a result of falling in some icy water on her way to meet friends. She’d let her friends go on ahead because she wanted to stay behind and set her video to tape an episode of her favourite TV programme. The front-page headline ran along the lines of “Killed by Pop Idols”. The ITV programme’s logo was featured but a picture of the girl was not - inside the paper there was one photo of the tragic young lassie but two or three larger photos of folk singing and dancing on the TV show. The death of a young girl was only worth reporting because there was some sickeningly tenuous link with a popular TV show.

That is the Daily Record. That is the tabloids. When you let them wind you up about your football club and you let them encourage you to hate other people then you’re nothing but a pathetic victim of your own stupidity.