The Scottish Cup Final: Rangers v Hibs

[Frankie 8,145]

The efforts of Michael Grant to tar us with the same brush as those who causes the trouble are rather unsurprising...

[JFK-1 1,666]

I hope we pull them in a cup this season and ground them into the dust. Then watch the exuberance.

[ian1964 10,409]

I have no doubt Rangers will be fined as much as Hibs!,shocking yet unsurprising!,the cabal that runs Scottish football are embarrassing!

[craig 5,195]

I have no doubt Rangers will be fined as much as Hibs!,shocking yet unsurprising!,the cabal that runs Scottish football are embarrassing!

 

If that happens then the fans should march upon Hampden again

[cooponthewing 1,139]

Guys, we can procrastinate till the cows come home, tbh we seem to have been doing that forever. Until we realise, as a unit that these people will not rest, no matter what, until our club, and as it seems more recently our place in society is destroyed, we will forever be left with such a dilemma as Ian has mentioned. What do we do??

Everything is reactionary we must proactively as a fan base and a club keep pursuing this. I hope with the new fan group and relationship with the board/club we have turned a corner. We will see??

[ian1964 10,409]

For a country that has convened national soul-searching summits following touchline scuffles, much of the reaction to the Scottish Cup final violence has been the equivalent of an awkward attempt to avoid eye-contact with all things Rangers. The root of the frustration felt by Rangers fans is simple but unverifiable: The response would have been entirely different if the roles were reversed. If Rangers fans had attacked the players of another club there would be none of the ifs and buts and 'what about the songs’ that look awfully like Rangers-blaming if you squint only a little.

 

Attempts to understand the roots of the hatred directed towards representatives of Rangers that afternoon have looked like the most dreadful examples of whataboutery. Even if fans sometimes sing bad songs, making such a point in the context of attacks on football players flirts with justifying a little misdirected vigilante justice. It’s certainly another example of a country that increasingly struggles to distinguish between words and actions.

 

For many people, morals are like sycamore seeds in the wind when it comes to Rangers. The starting point is always the same: Rangers were in the wrong. Few stop to ponder what it says about the health of the Scottish game that it should need such a bogeyman. If you were to ask me for an image that represented Scottish football I’d find for you a match being played out against the backdrop of an almost empty stand. If asked to explain, I’d guess many of the missing people were probably at home nursing their dislike of Rangers and I’d only be half-joking. There are individuals I can think of whose allegiance to their own team often appears secondary to the fact they really don’t like Rangers.

 

Part of the problem is more general. It takes very little for Scottish football to revert to its default setting: teenage boy. Perhaps the terrible underachievement of the national team explains the prominence of the Wembley pitch invasion in our collective memory or perhaps, deep-down, lots of us thrill to the image of our boys literally taking over opposition turf and breaking stuff. After the Cup final, the leader of Glasgow City Council tweeted: 'Absolute amateurs as Hibs supporters fail to match up to Tartan Army standards and leave surface intact and remnants of the goalposts'. I guess he was hoping for more vandalism. Finding his feet a little later and perhaps remembering the position he occupies in public life he said: 'Any actions by fans on the pitch that intimidated players and other fans is a disgrace and the SFA and Police Scotland should investigate'.

 

There were obviously worse places to be when the referee blew the full-time whistle but social media quickly revealed itself to be a moral swampland. One employee of a Scottish political party claimed Rangers had issued the statement to 'divert attention’ from the fact Hibs had won the game. At times, the club and fans have done little to deserve sympathy from supporters of other teams but have we reached the point where this can count against the basic humanity of people being assaulted in the course of doing their jobs?

 

Even the first minister took to social media, properly congratulating Hibs on their victory and noting her Hibs-supporting husband, the SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, was one of thousands of happy fans that evening. But she apparently had nothing to say about people being assaulted at the national stadium, requiring police horses to restore order. In a statement issued the day after the game, Rangers criticised the first minister for 'passing comment on social media without any attempt to condemn the behaviour of Hibernian’s fans’. It also reminded her that Ibrox was located within her Glasgow Southside constituency.

 

She finally commented on the aftermath two days later and unreservedly condemned the scenes. Asked about the statement from Rangers she responded: 'Congratulating a team for winning a cup after 114 years cannot be equated to excusing the behaviour of any fans who behaved unacceptably'. Rangers, of course, neither stated nor implied that she had excused the bad behaviour of fans. The club’s complaint, and it was a legitimate one, was that she hadn’t mentioned it at all.

 

Elements of the same Rangers statement were misguided, notably the part claiming Rangers fans entered the pitch only to defend players and staff. While this might have been the case for some and the statement was certainly correct to reference the extreme nature of the provocation from Hibs fans, it read like a blanket amnesty at a time when the club couldn’t possibly have established the actions of every fan. It was telling that, some days later, Rangers' managing director said the club would take action against any fans found guilty of disorder. This was the appropriate reaction and it wouldn’t have been any less so for being delivered on the Sunday.

 

The statement also revealed that no-one from either Hibernian or the Scottish Football Association had been in touch to inquire after the wellbeing of the players who had been assaulted. As a Rangers fan this felt, and still feels, like nothing short of contempt. Sometimes two-plus-two really does equal four and basic decency has been cheaply forfeited in Scottish football as people, including some of those 'running’ the game, gallop about on high horses. And if anyone were to suggest, by way of mitigation, that Hibernian officials might have been distracted by the preparations for the victory tour they would only further damn the club. Something resembling an acknowledgement of what had happened finally emerged from Easter Road at teatime on Monday in the form of a statement that nevertheless made sure to lead off with reference to the 'historic’ nature of Hibs’ triumph. It was, but, you know…

 

Perhaps the high-profile nature of events will lend an uncharacteristic efficiency to the response of the Scottish football authorities but if you hold your breath it will likely be the end of you. Back in February the Scottish Professional Football League informed Motherwell that it would be a further 18 months before they were punished for events at a game in May 2015 that included, but were not limited to, Motherwell fans running onto the pitch to goad Rangers fans and one Rangers player being struck with a flag pole. Sadly, any deterrent effect will not be retrospective.

 

Little indignities count for little when measured against the violence that took place but the Rangers players weren’t able to return to the field to receive their runner-up medals. These are people who never had an EBT and, for obvious reasons, they can’t sing the Billy Boys when Rangers are playing. Hibernian chairman Rod Petrie in his post-game press conference regretted that the players 'felt they were unable to come back out'. According to reports, someone from the SFA handed the medals to a Rangers squad player to dispense rather than go into the dressing room personally.

 

http://www.scottishreview.net/AlasdairMcKillop42a.html

[Bearman 9]

TBB is just a song that Rangers fans sing in joy when the players come on the pitch, it was always sung after the Rangers scored a goal, it was repeated when the team showed ascendancy during the match whether it was a goal-line clearance from Amoruso (Catholic) or a shot off the post by MoJo (Catholic).

 

Singing of a song with your team in mind and nothing else is far less harmful than flicking a fly off your arm.

 

Invading the pitch and assaulting opposition players at work...well!

Edited June 15, 2016 by Bearman

[Bearman 9]

TBB has now been turned upside down folks, thanks to the pc mob.

 

When Rangers fans sang it at Hampden at the Cup Final it was because of the way we have been treated over the last decade or so, Rangers fans 'binned' the song long ago in the hope IRA chants would also be eradicated from our society, we really went along with it even although the song itself wasn't glorifying in death and genocide from your everyday typical Rangers fan simply because they thought it was a Rangers song ...at the Cup Final the song re-emerged not in triumph but in anger at what we witnessed on that day. Sure the media have a right to question why we sing it...the reason was obvious and it's all their own fault.

 

How long do we have to wait for songs glorifying a terrorist organisation be stopped?

Edited June 15, 2016 by Bearman
Suspect grammar

[barca72 440]

TBB has now been turned upside down folks, thanks to the pc mob.

 

When Rangers fans sang it at Hampden at the Cup Final it was because of the way we have been treated over the last decade or so, Rangers fans 'binned' the song long ago in the hope IRA chants would also be eradicated from our society, we really went along with it even although the song itself wasn't glorifying in death and genocide from your everyday typical Rangers fan simply because they thought it was a Rangers song ...at the Cup Final the song re-emerged not in triumph but in anger at what we witnessed on that day. Sure the media have a right to question why we sing it...the reason was obvious and it's all their own fault.

 

How long do we have to wait for songs glorifying a terrorist organisation be stopped?

 

I felt it was more in defiance. Rather than run onto the park, and make the situation worse, the Rangers' fans gave the Hibs' fans a GIRFUY with a blast of TBB.

[der Berliner 3,231]

Dunno, but going back through the years, the "defiance song" that always springs to mind was Derry's Walls, was it not? Though there is little arguing about why TBB was sung at the Cup Final.

 

It beggars belief, again, how the mhedia twists this to their tune.