The Sectarian bile we heard on Sunday at Ibrox is the boil that needs lanced in Scottish football, but you won’t see the Celtic board doing anything about it

Over on the Celtic blog today, James did a piece about the pugnacious bile that poured from the stands at Ibrox last Sunday.

If I’m being honest, I have just become accustomed to hearing it at every Ibrox game.

But don’t get me wrong, while I might have become accustomed to it, I’m certainly not immune to it.

Being an Irish Catholic, it gets my hackles up.

Every. Single. Time.

But its a rage I somehow manage to keep quelled.

I guess that comes from years of being conditioned to listening to it, and also the knowledge that nothing is going to change when it comes to this.

Even Martin O’Neill is somewhat immune to it.

Or more to the point, he has learned to rise above it.

His post match comments had an underlying message to all of us.

When the Celtic boss said the atmosphere really brought him back, he meant that he knew how to rise above it.

He also understands that when you quieten the Ibrox crowd, you are achieving something.

When you shut up all of their bluster and bombast, because that’s all it is, they retreat into a shell and then slowly but surely aim their bile at their own players.

Their fragility is down to the fact that they are serial losers, and we all know that they lack bottle when it comes to a real fight.

Martin O’Neill knows exactly how to play on this.

That is what he did in the second half in taking the game to them on their turf.

All of this does not take away from the fact that Sunday’s game was still an inveterate hate-fest.

I lost count of the amount of times I heard the billy boys.

Singing of this song is considered a hate crime in Scotland, and its against the law.

But it seems that the attitude of Police Scotland is, “Well, if 48,000 of them are singing it, we can’t arrest them all, can we?”

What’s worse is that it seems that the attitude of the Celtic board is, “The fans don’t take any notice of it, so we’ll just ignore it. No need to do anything about it, even when they sing it at our place.”

Its this sort of blasé attitude to what is hatred of the most vile kind that is the reason nothing is ever done about it.

Sky just act like it never happens by drowning out or toning down the sound of it, while Ian Crocker extolls the virtues of the brilliant Ibrox atmosphere on a regular basis.

The Scottish Mainstream Sports Media blanks it almost completely.

With the exception of Ewan Murray in the Guardian, who James highlighted as he called it out to some degree.

For those of you who haven’t read Murray’s article, here’s what he had to say on it:

At this point, Ibrox was raucous. Far too much of the racket involved the kind of sectarian trash that Scotland’s football authorities and R*****s themselves have allowed to return due to pitiful inaction. R*****s, now under American ownership, should be working much harder to remove this archaic stain on the club’s reputation. Yet on the field at least, R*****s were progressive. O’Neill branded his team “uncertain” in quite the understatement. Mikey Moore, the Tottenham loanee, was tormenting the Celtic defence.

We’ve long given up hope of Scotland’s football authorities doing anything about this.

As for the Ibrox club themselves?

Once again, with the American takeover and subsequent ownership, Andrew Cavenagh and Co. had the chance to clean up the club’s act.

They clearly chose not to.

Or maybe they did at the outset, but it seems like they didn’t have the stomach for it if Sunday was anything to go by.

Cavenagh has an Irish name – I don’t know if he’s Catholic – or even cares about religion for that matter, but surely when he hears the bile pouring from the Ibrox stand, he must cringe?

Any self respecting, decent human being would.

But it seems that no matter who you are, once you pass through the doors of Ibrox and climb the marble staircase, you become consumed by the hatred that has festered in the walls of that place for more than a century.

I genuinely believe that there is a lot of bad karma in that place.

However, the people who could actually do something about this reside inside the walls of Celtic Park.

Yet they choose to do nothing.

People like Brian Wilson, with all of his political connections, could shine a light on this.

But he chooses not to.

The Celtic board in their entirety choose not to be solutions to this problem.

In fact, they do the total opposite.

They embrace it, and welcome it to Celtic Park, just as they did last January.

They welcomed some of the worst elements of the Ibrox support, the ultras group the Union Bears, while they locked our own ultras group, the Green Brigade out.

Throughout the entirety of that game, they were allowed to pour their bile on us from our own stands.

Meanwhile, the North Curve stood silent.

From that perspective, if the Celtic board is not willing to even attempt to become a solution to this problem, then they just become a part of it.

Just as they are a part of many problems at Celtic Park.

We are over a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and we are still dealing with bollocks that belongs in the dark ages.

Its high time this boil on Scottish football was lanced, once and for all.

The Celtic fanbase is pushing hard for change at the club right now.

But if we manage to get that change at the club, shouldn’t this issue be front and centre once again?

The Bhoys against bigotry campaign was started almost 30 years ago, yet were no closer today to stamping it out of the game.

If we can achieve change at the club in the coming months, or even years, we need to enact change when it comes to bigotry and sectarianism.

The Americans had the chance to do it at Ibrox after their takeover, but after Sunday’s naked display of recidivist behaviour at Ibrox, its clear they’ve failed miserably on that score.

Fergus McCann was heavily invested in purging all aspects of Scottish football of this kind of behaviour.

Even the SFA.

As soon as he left the club, it seems as if it became an afterthought.

Hence the reason its as prevalent today as it was back then.

In fact, if anything, it is worse, simply because nobody does anything about it.

Nobody seems to have the stomach for it.

Not least our gutless board.

Celtic needs another figurehead like Fergus McCann.

Somebody who will fight for the club, and fight for the rights of its fanbase.

The current custodians see us as the enemy, so they will do nothing for us.

Until such time as we have someone who will, then sadly, experiences like Sunday will just be the norm.

And it is a norm that is wholly unacceptable in this day and age.

Yet we’ll experience it all again next Sunday.

And apathetically accept that its something we just can’t change.

No matter how angry it makes us.

But we can, and we should, and it should be a huge part of our drive for change at the club.

Because if we don’t tackle it now?

Its unlikely it ever will be tackled.