an independent summary of the old firm...

[andrew_2010 0]

Quite possibly the best article I've seen in print on the old firm. And what is even rarer, it seems balanced and objective! What do you think?

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/rangers-and-celtic-disunited-they-stand-2236083.html

 

Rangers and Celtic: Disunited they stand

Yesterday, Scottish authorities set out a plan to tackle Glasgow's football violence. But the Rangers and Celtic divide is part of the city's soul, argues Richard Wilson

Wednesday, 9 March

 

Blue or Green? Billy or Tim? In Glasgow, your identity is reduced to a single imperative, something that your surname or the school that you attended reveals; or the football club that you support. Rangers or Celtic? The Protestant/Catholic division across this city, and the entire west of Scotland, is deeply felt enough to be relevant still, to still shape the behaviour of different generations, that it survives even the erosions of time.

 

The Old Firm clubs have come to be its most lasting, most forceful, on

occasions even its most repugnant expression; nowhere else in world football

is a rivalry based quite so clearly along religious lines, making it

something unique, however thrilling or bleak it can turn. This enmity should

have diminished, since it reaches back two centuries and has never been more

under siege from changes in society, but Glasgow remains vulnerable to its

old tribalisms.

 

 

Many of the segregation lines are now blurred: the city is increasingly

secular, mixed marriages between Protestants and Catholics have never been

higher, the middle classes are spreading in number and influence, and the

old certainties of the Protestant working class voting Conservative and the

Catholic working class voting Labour are now lost. These evolutions affect

the followings of both clubs, so that the two supports have never been more

homogenous, but they still cling to that solitary divide: religion.

 

 

Why can a football match between Rangers and Celtic end in a riot, or in a

young man being stabbed to death because of the football jersey he is

wearing? Why is it that players from outwith Scotland can become so inflamed

that three Englishmen playing for Rangers ââ?¬â?? Terry Butcher, Chris Woods and

Graham Roberts ââ?¬â?? ended up in court with Frank McAvennie, the Celtic striker;

or that Paul Gascoigne could receive death threats after miming playing a

flute (in reference to Orange Walks); or that Artur Boruc, a Polish

goalkeeper, could be cautioned for gestures made to Rangers fans, including

blessing himself? Why is it that the police report spikes in assaults,

disorder and domestic abuse in the aftermath of Old Firm games? Or that

paramedics and accident and emergency departments are inundated with drink

and violence-related cases? Rangers and Celtic have become symbols for their

communities, they provide a sense of identity that still relates to the

sectarian divide that was once prevalent in Glasgow; in the songs and

banners of the rivalry, a language of hate persists.

 

 

A kind of madness can arise on Old Firm days, something absurd but also

deep-rooted and vehement. It is expressed in songs that glorify the IRA, or

about being "up to our knees in Fenian blood". They are Scottish

clubs, but the rivalry is shaped as much by Irish politics, immigration,

unionism and republicanism, as religion (the Catholic church and the Orange

Order once feared that the Troubles would spread across the Irish Sea).

 

 

Rather than Saltires, it is Union Jacks and Irish Tricolours that are the

flags of these games. King Billy, Bobby Sands, The Sash, The Fields of

Athenry; an Old Firm match is an untidy accumulation of history, spite,

anger, and confusion. It is a football derby, like those in Milan, Buenos

Aries or Istanbul, but one in which the rivalry has become entrenched in

ancient hostility.

 

 

It is this tension that provokes such an intense environment that matches

between Rangers and Celtic can become overwhelmed by the baggage carried

into them (or make them compelling spectacles). In 1980, the Scottish Cup

final between the two sides ended with supporters fighting on the pitch, and

a subsequent ban on alcohol being served at football grounds. In 1999, when

Rangers won 3-0 at Celtic Park to effectively clinch the championship, Hugh

Dallas, the referee, was hit by a coin in the forehead, and individual

Celtic fans tried to invade the pitch.

 

 

Football dominates ââ?¬â?? Istanbul is the only other city to house three stadiums

with capacities over 50,000, but has a population of 13m compared to only

600,000 in Glasgow ââ?¬â?? because it is the sport of the working man. The grime

of Glasgow's industrial past, the sweat, dirt, pride and poverty that were

for so long the defining influences, still cling to every surface, however

often they have been whitewashed. In the days when the Clyde shipyards and

the narrow housing tenements of the Gorbals were domineering places, men

would surge out at lunchtime on a Saturday and head straight for the

football. The sport combined with drinking to provide the main sources of

relief from the terrible grind of working life. And the city's two teams

became the country's two major clubs by the same forces of history and

culture that shaped Glasgow itself.

 

 

Celtic were formed in Glasgow's east end in 1888 by Brother Walfrid, a Marist

monk, to raise money for the city's impoverished Catholic community, and

also keep the youths away from the Protestant soup kitchens. As the club of

the Catholics, Celtic's early glories prompted a form of indignation in

Scottish society, as the country was resolutely, defiantly even, Protestant.

Rangers were established in 1873 with no religious ties, but the club's

size, success and location in the city's south side saw it become the club

that the Protestant majority gathered behind to stand up to Celtic.

 

 

There were two waves of mass immigration from Ireland to Scotland; one mostly

Catholic, in the 19th century, the other, in the 20th century, more mixed.

The first influx prompted an anti-Catholic sentiment in the west of

Scotland, a feeling that was exacerbated by the second, when workers arrived

to find jobs in the Govan shipyards (in the 1920s there were even

anti-Catholic political parties). Other British cities, such as Liverpool,

Manchester and Cardiff, also received thousands of Irish settlers, and each

suffered sectarian tensions and riots of their own in the early 20th

century, only for them to fade out over time. The division remained in

Glasgow because of its proximity to Ireland, allowing ease of travel and

communication between the two countries, and Scotland's sense of itself as a

Protestant nation.

 

 

There was a time in the west of Scotland when certain jobs and firms were

widely known not to employ Catholics, a stance mirrored by Rangers' never

having signed a high-profile Catholic player until Mo Johnston, the former

Celtic striker, moved to the club from Nantes in 1989. Johnston was

protected by a bodyguard, and some fans were aghast at his arrival, until he

scored the winning goal in an Old Firm game. Now, Catholics have captained

and managed the club, and a player's religion is no longer relevant.

 

 

Bigotry remains the background noise of Old Firm matches, even although the

majority of fans no longer even practise their religion, and the encounters

often teeter on the edge of malevolence. There are Celtic-only and

Rangers-only pubs, supporters travel to Ibrox or Celtic Park on pre-ordained

routes so that they cannot encounter each other, the matches kick-off at

midday on a Sunday to prevent drinking beforehand, and the city tenses, so

that you feel something fraught in the air. The derby is combustible because

of the religious divide ââ?¬â?? which provides the means of expression, the

context of the hatred ââ?¬â?? but also other factors.

 

 

Rangers and Celtic are Scotland's two dominant clubs, so their games

inevitably influence the title race and the outcome carries a great weight

of meaning; Scotland is so small, and the teams so big that it might be

described as a national derby (more people followed Rangers to the 2008 Uefa

Cup final in Manchester than attended the papal mass in Glasgow last year);

there is an element of supporters living up to the game's reputation, so

that the theatre of it ââ?¬â?? the noise is deafening and relentless ââ?¬â?? is

self-fulfilling.

 

 

It is a football rivalry, but one that is darkened by its surroundings. Heavy

drinking is rife in the west of Scotland, Glasgow has an entrenched gang and

knife culture that treats violence as customary, and there are areas of such

poverty, low life expectancy and unemployment that the sense of identity

provided by Rangers and Celtic is clung to desperately. There are good and

bad elements to both sets of supporters, and the flares of anger and

resentment on the field are no worse than other derby matches. Alex Salmond,

Scotland's First Minister, is not the first politician conspicuously to

intervene, but his time might be better spent promoting anti-sectarian

education (although many Scots believe that support for Catholic schools,

which separate children from a young age, is a mitigating factor) and in

tackling the problems of heavy drinking.

 

 

Sectarianism is no longer prevalent in Scottish culture, and religion no

longer the central influence in people's lives. Yet the Old Firm game is

blighted by the language of its enmity, the history it drags back into

prominence. The football rivalry exists within this last remnant of hatred,

so that the occasion reflects Glasgow's old antagonisms.

 

Richard Wilson is writing a book on the Old Firm called "Inside The

Divide" that will be published by Canongate

The Old Firm: What they say about football's bitterest rivalry

 

2011

 

"We've both got a lot of experience of this fixture and know that

sometimes, in the heat of the moment, things can be said and words exchanged."

 

Celtic manager Neil Lennon after his touchline fracas with Rangers' Ally

McCoist after last Wednesday's game

 

 

"The unedifying sight of two of the country's most recognisable and

respected coaches engaged in an angry confrontation was not only unsavoury

but exacerbated an already incendiary atmosphere inside the stadium and

throughout the west of Scotland."

 

SFA Chief Stewart Regan after last Wednesday's violence

 

2005

 

"There's a thing in a football ground called a 90-minute bigot, someone

who has got a friend of an opposite religion next door to them. But for that

90 minutes they shout foul religious abuse at each other and we've got to

handle in the first instance the 90-minute bigot."

Lawrence Macintyre, head of safety for Rangers FC

 

"I have never identified football with religion. Today there are probably

more Catholics playing for Rangers than there are playing for Celtic. I

agree there is still vitriol but you have to look at it in the context of

where it is coming from. There are hardcore elements within the two sets of

supporters. It works both ways."

 

Jack Ramsay, the head of the Orange Lodge in Scotland

1998

[metlika 0]

Ian already made a thread, mate http://www.gersnetonline.co.uk/vb/showthread.php?26596-Rangers-and-Celtic-Disunited-they-stand

[andrew_2010 0]

Ian already made a thread, mate http://www.gersnetonline.co.uk/vb/showthread.php?26596-Rangers-and-Celtic-Disunited-they-stand

 

Apologies, I totally missed it. I actually saw it on facebook from a canadian friend living in Glasgow who has no interest in football!