If you are one of the legions of decent, fair-minded Rangers supporters then maybe you shouldnt read on: you will only find the subject wearying, aggravating, a further embarrassment for your club.
In fact, your only conclusion might be this: the humiliations that sections of Rangers supporters continue to heap upon their club appear to be limitless.
Villarreal, Pamplona, Manchester, now Bucharest. Why is it that, when Rangers FC and their spineless supporters spokesmen start groping around for excuses, the common themes of heavy-handed policing or these are not real Rangers fans are forever trotted out? Cant any club official, or any supporters representative, ever come clean on this? Will someone at Rangers finally find the guts to say: We have a major problem with our support and it is ruining this club?
The scenes in Bucharest last Wednesday night at Rangers Champions League tie against Unirea were tediously familiar. But almost as bad, in the context of accountability, was Rangers feeble response to it. It was Manchester and the Uefa Cup final riots of 2008 all over again.
Do you remember what happened there? The big TV screens in town went blank so the Rangers fans started rioting. The very next morning, amid some of the quickest gathering of intelligence I have ever come across, Martin Bain and Rangers hosted a press conference at which it was established that this was just a small minority of fans who had been involved, and that the miscreants were people who dont normally attach themselves to our support.
This was about 30 minutes before Sky TV began to broadcast gruesome footage of hundreds of not real Rangers fans drunkenly setting about anything in sight in Manchester. And it was about 10 months before not real Rangers fans were humiliatingly strung up like felons on the BBCs Crimewatch programme, as the quest to track them down went on.
After the Manchester riots, just like after Bucharest four nights ago, Mr Bain and Rangers revealed an uncanny habit of placing more emphasis on defending, rather than condemning. Literally within half an hour of the aggro in Bucharest, Bain was issuing a 78-word statement, the first 21 of which said this: Obviously, the behaviour of some of our fans in the stadium tonight is not acceptable no one likes to see that.
And the rest of it? Well, wasnt it simply dreadful the way the Rangers fans were treated. I mean, come on, four turnstiles should have been operating, but instead there were only two. And all that CS gas being used on our poor fans.
Note the different tone in Bains statement. The fact that Rangers fans rioted was unacceptable and no-one likes to see that. But the fact the Romanian police used CS gas to subdue them? Why, this was totally unacceptable.
The response of Andy Kerr, of the Rangers Supporters Assembly, was even worse. Kerr actually had the temerity to state: I wouldnt say the Rangers fans did anything wrong. The organisation was very poor. And on the very same night we had the official Rangers website stating that our fans suffered heavyhanded treatment by the police. Ah, yes, the old heavy-handed policing line. This is an old Rangers favourite.
There is almost an indecent haste, as there was in Bucharest, to soft-soap some of this Rangers loutishness with anodyne utterances about policing, stewarding, whatever. I do not doubt for a moment that the situation in that Steaua stadium was unsatisfactory. One supporter I spoke to who was there testified to crumbling terraces and a bottleneck at the turnstiles, where Rangers fans were attempting to gain access to the ground. But is this a licence for thuggishness? Do decent human beings, in finding themselves in such a situation, start fist-fights, throw seats around, and brawl with stewards, as Rangers fans did the other night?
Denial, denial, denial. It does Rangers FC no good. And it assumes that the rest of us are too dim-witted to recognise the cold, hard evidence that is staring us and the governing body of European football in the face.
In the expansive canon of excuse-making for Rangers and their fans antics, one of the great farragoes that is used is this heavy-handed policing line. In Villarreal in 2006, when the bigoted chanting by Rangers fans and the attack on the Spanish clubs team bus occurred, there was, if you were prepared to believe certain Rangers supporters groups, heavy-handed policing which only served to worsen the situation.
Then we moved on to Pamplona a year later where how unusual some Rangers fans chanted bigoted anthems and fought with stewards. The Rangers supporters bodies reponse? Really, we cannot condone some of the heavy-handed policing that we saw …
Then we got to Manchester in May 2008. Now, before I go any further here, can I just confirm one thing? The Greater Manchester Police have they a reputation for aggression or heavy-handedness? No, I thought not. So we had these garish TV images of hundreds of Rangers supporters fighting, rioting, overturning cars. And what was the supporters clubs response? While we cannot condone some of the antics of our supporters, we really believe that heavy-handed policing … Yes, yes. I think weve heard enough.
Rangers are the sick man of British football. They cannot gouge out the bigots and the undesirables from their support. There is something of the white underclass about a section of this clubs support which only guarantees intermittent but perennial embarrassment for Ibrox.
It is as if a previously arrogant attitude around Rangers FC, now being overwhelmed by a more modern, multi-ethnic, ecumenical society around it, cannot cope with these changes and feels threatened by them.
On Thursday Uefa quite rightly stepped in, cut through all the obfuscation around the events in Bucharest, and opened yet another prosecution case against Rangers. For the long-term good of Rangers, I hope Uefa throw the book at them the filthy orange bastards, and I believe they will.
