Kneel Lemmon is a pyoor ded mann

Neil Lennon. I really don’t like him - as a footballer. Neil Lennon. I really don’t know him - as a person … so how the hell can I say whether I wouldn’t actually get on great with the guy? He likes Duran Duran - that apart, I’m sure we could find loads to “ave a larf” over in a non-footballing context.

God knows I’ve met a few Rangers players, past and present, who I know I’d fall out with inside the first ten minutes of dropping the hero worship act and actually trying a real conversation.

What happens on the park should stay on the park. I’ve personally tested this theory a few times with the man himself. Lennon’s walked right past me on Byres Road on two seperate occasions and, while I was hurt he didn’t stop and say hello, there’s no way I ever felt like smacking him, spitting on him or even mumbling “basturt” under my halitosis.

I’m a Rangers fan - I challenge anyone to love the club more than me. I am, in fact, what you might call a Rangers Fundamentalist (emphasising the “mentalist”) and the idea of bringing the shame - even by association - on my club that such a personal attack on Lennon or any other Celtic player would create, is abhorrent. I couldnae live with myself.

I’ll do like most of us do and slag him to the most proverbial of deaths at the game, in the pub to my mates and, most of all, on this website. Lennon’s a wind-up merchant - yeah - but so is Ricksen and I don’t see anyone threatening to hound him out the country (Not if they don’t want a partriculally large firework up their jacksey they won’t!).

Martin O’Neill gets Union Jacks planted in his garden, Derek Stillie gets guys hanging about his house because he let six in at Ibrox, Tore Andre Flo gets his car slashed … Neil Lennon got his car slashed too. The question with the obvious answer is what the hell does all this have to do with football?! It certainly has nothing to do with the vast majority of those who support Rangers or Celtic.

Listen, see that kind of pish which went on whenver it went on outside the guy’s house and was then all over the tabloids this morning - it made me cringe because it just isnae fair. On either Lennon or Rangers.

A few years ago I went into print trying to calm down the rising press mock-furore about the Celtic fans making the Aeroplane gestures to Claudio Reyna in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I made the point that in the very same game Bobo Balde was receiveing sickening racist abuse. The varying PsOV within both sets of fans about what they chant or mime towards opposition players (at ANY game - I’m talking about fans of any club now) can be as wide and varied as they are worrying and reassuring by turn. Some feel that both the “sticks and stones” and “society’s pressure valve” rule should apply within the singularly unreal environment of a football stadium (Tim Parks is great on this subject in A Season With Verona) and others see such deeply insulting behaviour as automatic exemption from the right to be a “supporter” of the club in whose name you perpetrate these crimes. But these arguments generally even out the debate between the rival clubs involved - it’s the player in question who is so often forgotten.

But I can say without a shadow of a doubt that, FOR ME, what goes on outside the ground should only be the same as what goes on when we leave the cinema. It’s not real for godsakes - just leave it out. Anyone who can’t seperate the theatre of the football pitch from the mundanity of real life is every bit as insane as the old lady who assaults the actor in the street because he plays a villain on the TV. Except that the violence involved is likely to be worse than a whack with a handbag.

This applies to the actual players, mind. I can’t say I’m so ready to drop the tribalism when it comes to rival fans, walking down a street ten miles from the ground , flaunting their colours in an “I dare You” sort of way (I don’t care if she was in a pram - she was HAVING A GO!!!). Some of the stuff which went on in Glasgow on the day of the 2003 UEFA cup final was nothing to do with celebration - but I know Rangers have the same amount of nutters who just can’t wait to rub folks noses in the hatred rather than get away among like-minded friends and make it all about the love.

Anyway - I digress. I only started writing this rant because some twat made the usual tabloid-encouraged “plea” that I should condemn all acts of sectarianism blah, blah, blah. It’s the usual kind of emotional blackmail which emerges from either side of the Old Firm divide whenever the other side is wronged in an ABC Moral Outrage. Anyone reading this site or its predecessors for any length of time or reading any of the stuff I’ve had published in When Saturday Comes etc should know how I feel about racism etc (Christ! Who wrote the piece in 4-4-2 last year about the Asian Rangers and Celtic fans??? Do I have to mention all this in a self-agrandising “lot of work for charidee” styleee just because I watch the same fitbaw team as some psycho with a paint-brush??!!) Well, I support Rangers and, for many a moron, this is in itself an act of sectarianism. These tend to be the same kind of folk who think that the acts of sinister aggression towards Lennon are “nothing to do with football”. I’m afraid I don’t see it so clearly - because the world, and especially the wide wide world of sport, just ain’t that black and white, blue and green.

We ask football to make up for so much in society that to sudenly turn round and say the game is an is an irrelevance when Neil Lennon’s personal safety is threatened is as crass as the behaviour of whichever scumbag painted that message at his house. Hate stupidity - no matter what scarf it wears - and hate hypocrisy, and whatever newspaper it appears in. Employ these maxims both in your acts and your reactions to the acts of others.

My advice to anyone who feels the need to get so violent in either deed or thought is to read Howard’s End. A bit of EM Forster will sort ye out. And then Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier .. cracking assault on sentimentalism. I was gonnae suggest Bill Murray’s Bhoys Bears and Bigotry but we all know no-one who could most benefit from it is capable of reading it with an open mind - so stick to non-football stuff. Just read literature … it helps ye spell betterer.


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