The Sun slams Rangers fans after protests at St Johnstone
Rangers fans’ protests during the match at St Johnstone showed Scottish football to be “insular and rotten” according to Robert Thomson in the Scottish Sun.
Fans were expressing their displeasure at the news that the club were set to join Celtic for a friendly tournament in Australia during the November break imposed by the Qatar World Cup.
The journalist pointed to the presence of Saints’ Ukrainian teenager Max Kucheriavyi, who watched the game with his nation’s flag around his shoulders after Russian forces invaded the country, as proof that Light Blues supporters have nothing to complain about.
Thomson writes: “But think, just for a minute, how young Max must have felt sitting watching grown men and women get themselves wound up, in a frothing temper, about two football teams travelling to the other side of the world to play a friendly kickabout against each other?
“It must have seemed truly ridiculous and dispiriting.”
He then goes onto to link the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s view of the West being “too decadent these days, too wrapped up in our own comfortable lives and first-world problems to worry about what’s going on elsewhere” and the protests.
Quite a leap
While it is factually accurate that the prospect of a friendly tournament in Australia between the Glasgow rivals is not as bad as being on the receiving end of a military invasion, it is a strange argument to make.
The general consensus is that fans in Britain are outraged at the atrocities occurring in Ukraine, more so even than they appear to have been about comparable situations elsewhere.
Whether you agree that Gers and Hoops fans are justified in being upset about the November plans is one thing.
Implying they are callous to express that view while there is a needless war going on is a significant leap forward.
Thomson might as well denounce the fans for caring whether Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s team won the game at McDiarmid Park, instead of focusing their attentions on the bloodshed.
The news coming out of Ukraine is without doubt horrendous, and in the grand scheme of things it is not the end of the world for the Old Firm to play outside of Scotland, but the two things are mutually exclusive and fans can be upset about both.
It is good to see the support being shown within football for Ukrainian players, and it would be nice to see the same in similar situations in future, but it appears to be an unnecessary stick to beat Light Blues fans with.
In other Rangers news, the BBC Sportscene pundits couldn’t believe some of the referee’s decisions in the win over Aberdeen.