It's been hyped to a massive extent by the enemies of the club with predictions of UEFA's sanction being wildly exaggerated well beyond the bounds of what the powers available to them allow for.
The charges are but one example of the lunacy of sport - in the 25 years or so since Ibrox became mainly all-seated and the alcohol ban was imposed in Scotland Rangers fans have a record second to none in terms of arrests and convictions. You can't even begin to explain to the young uns how things used to be when I first started following football - you used to get trouble everywhere - whether you wanted it or not. And that included midweek trips with school chums to that Nirvana of football aggro - Clydebank! When you compare Scottish football - and particularly the matchday experience at Ibrox - with run of the mill games in Italy, Holland, etc, we simply don't feature on the radar screen in terms of the security situation. It's more than curious that we end up on a UEFA charge sheet. It's not a coincidence. The charges against Rangers are without doubt politically motivated.
WHO WOULD DO SUCH A THING?
The small-town attitude of Scotland is such that there are no shortage of suspects looking for ways to dress up their envy and hate. I recall Eamonn McCann's observation from “War and an Irish town” where he talked of his disillusionment with the people who were coming to his meetings. He thought at first his firebrand socialist rhetoric was gaining a mass following, then he realised that for most of them ‘It was just another way of hating the Prods.'
It's obvious from the content of the ‘charge sheet' that the UEFA observer in Villarreal did not write the bulk of it. The idea that a UEFA observer could make out 12 distinct chants and then provide the historical background to them is ridiculous, someone else wrote his script for him. He's been handed a collection of tendentious twisted anti-Rangers hate dressed up as research from a number of extremely dubious sources. No doubt a major part of the Rangers legal defence will be based on discovering the sources as without an examination of their motivations no fair sentence can be handed out - you simply can't accept their premises of debate as impartial.
In this regard I am most grateful for the services of Mr Graham Spiers of the Herald newspaper for shedding so much light on the subject in his newspaper writings and his mass media appearances. Spiersy is not a stupid lad but his overweening arrogance means he makes mistakes. He simply talks and writes too much and then he does so he loses his discipline and that's how the mistakes mount up. His performance at Nil By Mouth meeting held earlier in the season was a classic with him sweating with zeal as he revealed to his seemingly-adoring audience his mission “in my position as Chief Sports Writer of the Herald” to ‘attack Rangers and David Murray in particular.' What other clubs did (or indeed the apartheid school system) was of no interest as what the cut-price Clarence Darrow of Byres Road was concerned with was Rangers fans (not just some) who were ‘pig-ignorant bigots.'
“IT WAS ORDERS”
Without the platform provided to them by their employers gutter sweepings like Spiers and McNee would be nothing. It is the culture which allows scandals Bannergate, Videogate and the Two Provo Tenors to go under or non-reported that is the problem. Mr Tim Blott of the Herald has been on the receiving end of a mountain of mail and email concerning the Herald's institutional bias against Rangers. Fans have few resources - but the moral and financial authority David Murray has means that once UEFA have done their thing he needs to come out and point the Rangers fans in the direction of those who must be punished. Celtic have shown the way when they got their corporate fans to boycott advertising and stuck up the Daily Record's “Thugs and Thieves” front page on their video screens at half time during the next Old Firm game - and they haven't had a problem since.
GRANDMASTER SUCK