Old Firm fans just want to get on with game

Published on Saturday 23 April 2011 18:10

IT'S lunchtime in Bairds Bar and preparations are already beginning for the big match. The Celtic supporters' pub is packed and lively, with drinkers' raucous laughter somehow managing to rise above loud live music.

The Celtic faithful seem to have taken the storm surrounding the mail bombs episode in their stride. One young fan, Frank Scott, said: "It's just another Old Firm match. They're all the same. When you're brought up amongst it, you learn to see it as just another game."

It is impossible to get away from the connections the bar in Glasgow's Gallowgate has with football and Ireland. Kenny Dalglish once held press conferences here and the walls are plastered with Celtic memorabilia.

Among the sea of green and white is a reproduction of Da Vinci's Madonna Of The Yarnwinder in which the Virgin Mary has had a tricolour scarf wrapped around her neck, while a picture of The Beatles has been altered so that the Fab Four are wearing the Celtic hoops.

For another drinker, John McSween, the sectarian behaviour displayed by some fans was something that rarely extended beyond the football stadium.

He said: "At the end of the day, it's bigotry for 90 minutes. I've got a lot of friends who are Rangers fans, and for the duration of the match you are enemies, but it ends there."

But for Jim Mullin, Bairds' Celtic club social convenor, the past week's events were in danger of eclipsing the importance of the match - the outcome of which was likely to seal the league title.

Both McSween and Mullin make the point that the controversy is the work of a minority, the former describing it as "terrorism".

Mullin said: "The fact that it's gone around the world is terrible. I've heard somebody on the radio saying that they received a call from their girlfriend in Barbados, asking them not to go to the match tomorrow. This is the result of out-and-out idiocy."

A five-minute drive away, similar sentiments are expressed in the avowedly Rangers pub The Bristol Bar, but the mood is very different. Although decked inside and out in patriotic red, white and blue, and sporting a banner congratulating Prince William and Kate Middleton on their impending wedding, the atmosphere could not be less celebratory.

At most ten people are in the pub, the majority of whom are either middle-aged or elderly, talking quietly to each other. The only real sign of a more lively side to The Bristol is the presence of a karaoke machine in the far corner.

The manageress is at pains to point out that the bar is a straightforward fans' pub and has nothing to do with the politics of the Old Firm. Two drinkers, who declined to be named, seemed weary of the continuing controversy.

"The people who did this are not Rangers fans," said one."It's got absolutely nothing to do with the game. As much as I don't like Neil Lennon, I would never threaten him.

"This sort of thing is taking away from the game. I don't even like Rangers and Celtic games, because I used to work in a bar and I've seen the effects of them. I've seen best friends and families fall out because of them. It's the only football match that doesn't finish when the whistle is blown. It goes on well into the night."

The second man said: "I just want to see Rangers win. I really don't care who they play, I just want to see them win."