Football Sectarianism

I meant to mention this before, but I never got around to it. It came to mind again whilst watching the Republic of Ireland beat Georgia 2-0 tonight. Shota Arveladze was playing for Georgia and had to put up with a sizeable proportion of the crowd booing his every touch. This happened because he is a Glasgow Rangers player. He hadn’t fouled anyone badly or faked an injury, which are the usual reasons for a crowd picking on a player. It was purely and simply a sectarian issue.

This isn’t an isolated incident. It has been going on for years. Rangers players, past and present, are routinely booed for 90 minutes. The idiots who did this even went so far as to spend most of the second half of a match last year booing the wrong player. The announcer at half-time made a mistake with a substitution and said that a player, who’s name I can’t remember now, was coming on when he actually wasn’t. The player who did come on was booed until the Rangers player actually did come on, at which point the crowd switched targets. Idiots the lot of them.

Some of the same people last year expressed disgust at the treatment Neil Lennon, a Glasgow Celtic player, received when he was captain of Northern Ireland. He was booed during a home match, by his own “fans”, and also received death threats. He has since retired from international football due to those threats. The people who booed Arveladze tonight are as much to blame for Lennon retiring as any Northern Ireland “fan” who booed him. They’re all feeding this foolishness and neither side will grow up and let it go. They’re all fools. They fail to see that by booing these players they show that they have more in common than they’d care to admit. No brains, just stupid bigoted reactions showing that we have a long way to come.