Ibrox Fans Should Spare Us The Sneering Over Scotland. They Have Their Own Problems.

I guess when you are in the doldrums you will grab at just about anything that offers you some brief respite from your pain and suffering. Most of us take pills. But when the pain is psychic pain, when, for example, it’s the pain of losing trophies you thought were in your grasp or when you find out your club’s football stadium won’t be ready for the start of the new campaign, what exactly do you take to make the hurt of that stuff go away?

Over on the Ibrox fan forums, they’ve spent the last week or two gloating over the fate of the Scottish national football team. I saw a headline today on the worst website in the county, Football Scotland, about how they were “furious” with Callum McGregor over something or another that he had done whilst on international duty, and I thought “why even bother?” Most of them don’t care about the national team, as their conduct on the forums makes clear.

The idea that they are angry because the national team hasn’t qualified is ridiculous. Or it’s just another excuse for them to pour out their bile. Since this tournament started they’ve been directing it at Steve Clarke, the SFA and, let’s be honest, the country itself, with many of them openly boasting about how they intended to support England anyway.

So they can spare us the mock frustration over the team not qualifying for the next round. Those of us who do care – and I know I don’t speak for everyone in Celtic cyberspace here, as one blogger made clear today with an attack on Celtic fans supporting Scotland which could have come off Follow Follow itself – are already pissed off enough. The last thing any of us can be bothered with are those who are pretending to be for their own selfish ends.

I have gone through spells of being angry enough at the SFA not to want Scotland to do well. But in the end, I always “come home”, I always remember that Scotland is my national team, that it’s the where I’m from, that it’s a country I am care deeply about.

I know we have troubles here, but I am a devoted patriot, and member of the 45%, and I am those things because there is a lot to love about this land and a lot to be proud of … and the things I most love and I am most proud of are amongst the reasons that our enemies hate this country, the one many of them were born in.

Almost everything about their support is warped. It should be no surprise that they have an acute identity crisis about their nationhood; it’s one that I do not share. I am tired of the fact that I have to share a country with people who hate it, and me, but that they tie these things together in their heads is the proof of how put upon they feel.

Rather than accept that they just aren’t as important, or as big, or as strong or as powerful as they once thought they were – back when their first club was fully funded by a bank that was way too close to Murray for its own good – they have convinced themselves that they are in their current position because a gigantic conspiracy is arrayed against them, at the heart of which is the SNP and the independence movement and thus, in a sense, Scotland itself.

So they don’t want Scotland to win, in much the same way as some of us are in the Anyone But England camp. Curiously, one of the reasons so many of us feel that way is that the England camp now includes them and a lot of goonish clowns just like them. Their own sense of identity is just as crazily skewed; they all have a sense of themselves as British first.

When those in their support cheer on England what they and some of that nation’s supporters are actually doing is celebrating Britishness, and a time when an increasing number of folks across all three countries that make up the union are rejecting that concept.

Part of that rejection brings forth, at last, a new strain of Englishness, one which is about civic responsibility, compassion for other people, an internationalist outlook and a rejection of the creeping ideology of the right, as expressed by Farage and others … and because of this one which seeks a new, and better, relationship with its neighbours.

And it’s at this precise moment that a large and growing section of the Ibrox support starts to cleave ever tighter to its perverse “British” identity. Well, that’s for them to do … but you would think that at the present time they have more to worry about than how Scotland is doing. But in this week of dreadful news for them, and the near certainty of worse to come on that front, they have to find something to fill them with good cheer and evidently this is it.

You could not make that up.