By Graham Spiers
Following Sunday's Old Firm game at Ibrox I find myself with a highly unusual dilemma on my hands, which is this: should a journalist report a supporter for indulging in bigoted or racist chanting?
Since the tousy affair at Ibrox, which Rangers won 2-1, I have received a number of e-mails from people after I mentioned in my column yesterday in The Times that a Rangers supporter sitting directly behind me in the main stand at Ibrox had twice bawled "F*** the Pope" during some of the home supporters' communal singing.
Bigoted chanting is an old sore with Rangers FC and its support, and the club makes weekly tannoy requests urging fans to report other supporters who indulge in such antics. Rangers even advertise a telephone number by which supporters can file such complaints with details (where the offender sits, etc). As you can imagine, the so-called "grassing" hotline is hardly popular among those Rangers diehards, for whom songs about Popes, Fenians and the rest of it is both a right and a privilege.
But journalists getting involved? It is one thing for someone in my position to report it and comment on it, but quite another to wade in and become an active participant. And yet more than one correspondent has written to me since Sunday and said something such as: "Go on then Graham ... let's see if you've got the guts to do it."
In fact, Sunday at Ibrox was no exceptional symptom of the Old Firm's bigotry problem - that is, if you are used to these things and simply accept that the droning choristers will not be able to help themselves. And in this regard, Rangers as a club are between a rock and a hard place.
Uefa has already punished Rangers for the bigoted antics of its supporters in 2006, an episode which proved excruciating for the club's directors. Yet since then, while some of Rangers' efforts to cure the problem have definitely slackened off, more and more people are commenting that the old Ibrox ills are creeping back. The Rangers pre-match anthem, Simply the Best, is now embarrassingly hijacked by throngs of supporters, who apply their own offensive lyric to the tune, as was the case once more on Sunday.
In my own specific experience on Sunday, a Rangers fan sitting behind my press position in the main stand was chanting so loudly and excitedly - and offensively - that it simply became a distraction. It was also quite sad when I turned round to look at him: he was youngish, maybe 18 or 19, and highly animated by events on the pitch, and in every other way quite a respectable-looking bloke.
It always comes back to the same dilemma: what can be done? Thousands of Rangers fans on Sunday afternoon repeatedly let rip with their popular refrain "we hate Celtic - fenian bas**rds", precisely the sort of language which caused Uefa to punish the club in 2006. Yet are Rangers, their stewards or the police supposed to wade in and apprehend hundreds of fans? It just isn't feasible.
Yet Rangers have gone mute on this subject, thanks in the main to local Scottish media pressure easing on them: not a cheep, not an utterance of condemnation from the club in recent times about such songs. Rangers are currently practising a cowardice on the subject which will once more return to haunt them. And it all remains cringe-making for those legions of decent Rangers fans who just wish the tribes of oafs in their midst would either be muzzled, or removed, or both. The club's image remains in the gutter.
I may or may not report my main stand miscreant to Rangers. In all honesty, I'm loath to. And in any case, the way Rangers are copping out of all this at the moment, would they be in the slightest bit interested?
http://timesonline.typepad.com/thegame/2009/10/cowardly-rangers-turn-a-blind-eye-to-bigotry.html
