Wow, well that rant fully supports your poor constructed argument.
Fake Celtic fan because I don’t believe exactly what you do? Club for all, support, team - are you ticking any of those boxes with the above? Think about that before calling someone fake.
People are allowed to have differing opinions. When someone gets irrationally angry at one, it usually tells you something.
It’s taken the SFA 7 years to come up with ‘don’t ban Morelos’ to stop us winning the title?
If they can cover widespread corruption like you say, I think they’d have stopped us before now, no?
The SFA are poor, the refs are horrendous, that we are agreed.
After 55 years of having at least one Saturday like last week....EVERY season....... is far, FAR too many, and too coincidental when Celtic are a becoming a threat! ...AND especially when close to achieving ten in a row!
You might not remember when the cheat was on, and to stop Celtic winning 10 iar back in March '75.
Oh I do!
I WAS THERE.
An orchestrated hun charge started in the second half towards the Dundee fans at Dens park to change the entire way football is run on earth.
It was decided that no more alcohol was served at football grounds in Scotland and a top ten premier league tier was introduced for the next season beginning August 8th...the first known football ground anywhere to implement this.
Also, for the first time in Europe fans were not allowed to walk around the grounds to different ends which the SFA called segregation.
When Dundee's Davie Johnstone (aka Biffo the Bear) scored in the 3rd minute, Dundee were playing well and were well on top. But in the 54th minute when Colin Stein was sent off ...ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE.
At that point Celtic went top of the league...Rangers went second and couldn't handle it. They threw, bottles, cans. darts and even very heavy cobbles taken from the bottom of Provost Road.
The referee pulled both teams off the park for almost 18 mins until the baton charging riot police smashed the uglies back.
When the game restarted it was as if Dundee were afraid to come out!
They didn't turn up, at least nothing like the team that played
before the riot.
THE GAME WAS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, CHANGED BY THE CHARGE AND TYPICALLY BY THE WORLD'S MOST EMBARRASSING CLUB.
I was with a Rangers supporting friend from Dundee, who was wearing a Rangers scarf, in the Dundee end of Dens Rd and a few yards from at least 20,000 huns. ( the crowd totalled about 29,000 that day).
We were both about 14 years old, but when Rangers went down to 10 men and still 1- 0 behind, IT WAS ALMOST LIKE A STAMPEDE...AND SOMEONE HAD SWITCHED THEM ALL ON AT THE SAME TIME. THEY KICKED, PUNCHED, STAMPED AND STABBED AT US WITH DARTS IN THEIR HANDS.
WE, THEM, US...ALL PUSHED FORWARD AND RAN FOR IT.
My friend Drew had fallen and gone down at my side seconds earlier and I just kept pushing forward. There was nothing I or 100 people could do to help him. I got a kick in my back which dislocated my lower lumbar, and felt as if I was paralysed. Somehow even through a numbness from my neck down, I made it to the wall at the pitchside and got dragged over and onto the pitch to safety by a huge guy wearing a Rangers scarf, who I knew to be from Dundee. I blacked out and came to in the Ninewells Hospital, about an hour later. and was treated for spinal injuries, which I'm glad to say almost fully recovered within a few years.
I was surrounded by hundreds of other Dundee and Rangers fans who also ran onto the pitch for safety, where the rioters were by now and chanting there anti-Catholic bile and gesturing that they were going to cut our throats.
I saw Drew the next day in the same hospital, when a porter wheeled me to his ward, after some 'witch' doctor put me over a rack and manipulated me till he thought it had helped enough and that I should keep moving my back slowly and in very short stages until things had all settled back in there usual places!!
When I saw Drew it took the air from my lungs......and that's no exaggeration! I didn't recognise him, as he looked like he had a full size rugby ball in his mouth. His eyes were badly swollen but closed as they had already put him into a coma, to stop the pain and shock from stopping his heart. The pain he must have felt up to that point is unimaginable.
There was an entourage of cops and medical staff around him, all seemingly talking at the same time... and then I saw his mother!
She was on the floor by his bed, and looked like she had been crying non-stop for a month, and was still crying but not a sound was coming out of her. She got up, and held me tightly and tried again to speak to me but couldn't get anything coherent out, or that I could pick up on. The police asked me about everything that I could tell them in the nurses' side room for over two hours. They admitted it was the worst thing they had ever heard or seen happen to anyone.
Drew had a damaged spinal cord, a snapped collar bone, broken femur and tibia, 9 broken ribs, a completely smashed pelvis, and several fingers broken. They had already operated on him within 2 hours of entering the ward, but I saw his arm and it was
still at an impossible angle, then I was physically sick, turned around, not wanting to be seen with it coming out between my fingers. They had already removed the dart that was sticking out of his chest as soon as he arrived in Ninewells.
They must have stamped or danced all over him....AND DREW HAD A RANGERS SCARF ON!
He was in hospital for almost fifteen months, missed all his o'levels......and had to learn to walk and eat again. GOD ALONE KNOWS WHY HE DIDN'T DIE.
Drew's father fell of a crane while servicing it and died, in a Monifieth quarry, when he was only about four or five, and before I knew him starting in our first primary. He also had a younger sister who had died in infancy, I never knew about. He came through most of his operations with flying colours but always looked in pain when he walked with us. He said he had had at least 55 major operations in nearly three years to fix him up and it cost at least a million pounds...so we called him Steve Austin..the 6 million dollar man....which sort of cheered him up.
Yet, he never complained, at least not that I ever knew about. I often had severe back pain for the first couple of years after my own brush with the grizzly bears, but compared to what he had been through ...and still was going through.....my agony was a luxury.
On July 27th 1978 it was Drew's 18th birthday and just over 3 years since the shame game and riots. He, myself, his mum and our friends celebrated it on an absolute scorcher of a day, and then I told him of a surprise my mother had for him and a couple of our friends by taking us all to Venice for a week with his mum..` ....all expenses paid.
He never had much in his life and his mum, a sole parent struggled to get by...let alone go abroad on holiday. The day before my birthday I said good bye to him and also reminding him a bit harshly ...that he couldn't be late as we were all leaving for Glasgow early the next day and had a two hour drive to get there.
The next morning August 1 1978, about 8:15 my mother's doorbell went and after about a minute I heard her gasp and continue to gasp every few seconds. It was Drew's mum and though I thought that he was a bit early, I got up and saw her clutching my mother in a state of tears. Earlier that morning, around midnight Drew had died and she said the ambulance men said he had had catastrophic heart failure and couldn't revive him. I couldn't go round, nor even went to his funeral, and never saw him again.
His mother was destroyed by this and we didn’t keep in contact after the first year of his death, and lost touch.
Three years later I’d emigrated to South Africa and returned after three years in 1985, when I met a friend who told me about the same time as I’d left, that Drew’s mum had committed suicide and that was all he could tell me. I was heartbroken for her when less than ten years earlier she and Drew had very little, but were as happy as a mother and son could be.
Now, things would have been different had we not gone to that game, but for a guy that was always happy, with a to die-for very pleasant natural demeanour …why should this happen to him at a sporting event? There is no doubt that these Rangers fans caused his early death and short life, albeit 3 years later.
A consultant neuro-surgeon assured me that the original trauma, constant pain, rehabilitation, and a plethora of daily drugs were all too much in such a short space of time but there were no other options for them back then to keep him alive.
Drew was a Rangers fan and I have always been a Celtic fan, we both grew up in Dundee together and Never Ever had a single fight or argument.
We both went to SS Peter and Paul’s RC. primary and Lawside RC Academy, and sometimes almost died laughing at the tricks, mischievousness, and general mayhem we would play on the nuns, our parents and my sisters.
BUT 41 YEARS ON AND I STILL MISS THAT GUY SO MUCH, I CAN’T PUT IT INTO WORDS.. OH MY GOD I MISS HIM.
I CAN’T GET CLOSE TO EXPLAINING TO MY MISSUS HOW A CELTIC AND RANGERS FAN CAN HAVE SUCH AN AFFINITY.
NOW,…… I DETEST THEM ALL, AND NEVER WANT ANY GOOD FOR THEM…EVER.
THE WHOLE FUCKING LOT OF THEM.
THAT DAY IS INDELIBLY ETCHED IN MY MIND AND HOW I WISH I COULD HAVE REACHED DOWN AND GRABBED HIM, BY THE COLLAR, THE NECK OR HAIR AND JUST RAN DRAGGING HIM TO THAT WALL……..WHERE A HUGE RANGERS FAN WOULD HAVE GRABBED US BOTH OVER TO SAFETY. HURT, BLEEDING, BROKEN, BUT SAFE.