So the Celtic fans are in town. Will we see a repeat of the chaos the Rangers fans brought to town on UEFA cup final day? I very much doubt it. I was speaking to some Scottish bloke on the Sky customer service line the other night, a Rangers fan; he is of the opinion that the Celtic fans will be on their best behaviour tonight, “just to prove they’re better than us.”
Does that mean that this Sky employee actually thought that, up until the Rangers fans defamed the previously saintly act of destroying a city centre, doing just that was the accepted norm for all away fans? Did he imagine groups of Celtic fans huddled together planning similar rampages, only thinking better of it because their rivals had beaten them to the punch?
“Yeh! We’ll fook et rayt oop McDoogle! A’ll git the boos shiltors and phoneboxeez!”
“No McDonnally! We must resist temptation. We must not follow the same path trodden by those moronic Rangers! We must grasp this opportunity to perform slander upon our protestant counterparts! No carnage shall ensue in Manchester tonight.”
I mean come on son are you really so short sighted, not everyone has an innate desire for macabre vandalism and violence.
Do you know I actually got whacked by a posse of track-suited, blue-jerseyed idiots whilst out searching for milk! There I was striding towards Co-op, putting all my Pedestrian Proficiency skills to good use, when a marauding squadron of jocks come right at me from all angles. I felt a blow to my chest and one on the back of my leg and in the blink of an eye they were gone again. Its almost as though they were just one single being; a giant ball of flailing arms and legs engineered to cause maximum damage, whilst simultaneously acting as an impenetrable barrier. Actually, that’s ingenious! Its like a 21st century adaptation of the Roman military’s Testudo technique. Maybe they aren’t so thick after all?
Actually I take that back given the scenes of devastation that I woke up to the next morning. Walking to work through the centre of town was like being in a scene from Call of Duty! Windows smashed, billboards ripped down, bus shelters flattened, phonebooths annihilated, tyres slashed. There were still some stragglers left, floating around town like the derelict hosts of frenzied souls that occupied them the night previous. One guy was slumped in the doorway of Primark, his jeans all torn to shreds muttering to himself in a language that one can only assume was Scottish. I wonder what was going through his mind at that moment? “Oh dear I’ve gone and soiled my best slacks again! I have a job interview today don’t I? What was the score? I need the toilet but cannot seem to generate any feeling in my lower body.“ The mind boggles.
There is one image that lingers in my memory from that morning. As I walked down Market Street towards what was left of Piccadilly Gardens, the sun beamed down right in my face and cast an almost ethereal glow over the whole place. The sound of an upstanding glass bottle being gently knocked over prompted me to turn around. There stood a proud Rangers fan devouring his morning burger whilst his black dog, garbed in a Union Jack overcoat, tucked into his breakfast of cloudy yellow urine streaming from the bottle.
How poetic, how British.
