Glasgow Cheer

We are pleased to inform our thousands of readers that the BoBW team has resurfaced after three weeks spent amongst the fascinating indigenous peoples of Meath, Dublin, Kildare, Offaly, Wicklow, and Glasgow. And if you think the fifth location seems a bit out of place with the other four, it's not. In fact you don't even have to take the 40 minute flight from Dublin to Glasgow to see one major element of its day-day-day life around Ireland -- football. Our informal visual poll is that even in this age of the Manchester United marketing juggernaut, shirts of Glasgow Celtic football club easily outnumber those of their English counterparts on Irish streets. The wearing of the club's green and white hoops is very much in.

One unexpected and potentially tricky consequence of the vocal support for Celtic amongst their fans in the Republic for the national team is that European football's governing body, UEFA, is unhappy with the booing of a Georgian player during a recent Georgia-Ireland match -- he was booed because he plays his club football for Celtic's Glasgow rival, the traditionally Protestant Rangers. In fact there's a laughable element to some fans' continued devotion to the old sectarian team model, because both clubs now draw many players from outside Scotland, players who couldn't care less about Glasgow's traditional sectarian rivalries. But anyway, a section of the Irish fans at the international match found the Georgian player's club affiliation sufficient grounds for booing, and the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) is worried that UEFA now have the national team on a watchlist for future sanctions if the problems persist. As a result, the FAI is making clear its stern disapproval of any such behaviour in future matches, with an imminent friendly against Australia (with two Rangers players) the immediate source of concern.

We're not sure whether it reflects the sophistication of the booers themselved, or the ease of putting up a website these days, but indicted fans have struck back via a self explanatory domain name, www.ok2boo.com. They make two points. First they rightly call attention to the FAI's preposterous description of the booing as "racist." There is a tendency in Irish officialdom to reach into a lucky bag of buzzwords to describe any behaviour that they don't like, and all the better if the description makes you sound like a thoroughly modern and sensitive person. So racist it was. Of course, this is utter nonsense -- if the booing is anything, it's sectarian, but even that's a stretch. The Georgian player is most likely Orthodox Christian, so is he being booed because of that? Perhaps there's still ill-feeling in Lansdowne Road about the Great Schism.

The fans' basic case is that Celtic-Rangers is a classic club rivalry, that it's the job of fans to create an atmosphere that helps their team, which may involve finding reasons to boo the other team, and thus the club affiliations of the other team's players are just another item on the checklist of excuses to boo. No malicious intent. But somewhere in the seeming overreaction of the FAI, there is a valid point. Have the Irish fans of Celtic asked themselves precisely why they support Celtic and despise Rangers? One can always take the copout and answer, like in Fiddler on the Roof, Tradition! But any further exploration can't escape the fact that Rangers are considered worthy of contempt because they are associated with Protestantism. Maybe one responds that the association is with Unionism, not Protestantism. But UEFA, with tricky fixtures in the Balkans to think about, is going to be very leery about accepting political rivalries as a justification for fan behavior. We hope that website becomes ok2booequally.com.