The crowd are on the bitch

Is the booing of Shota Arveladze the most shameful thing to have happened at Lansdowne Road in recent memory? Hardly.

Such a claim would be news to those who witnessed the riots of February 1995, for a start. And it’s not even as much of a nadir as the bitterly cold November afternoon when Roy Keane was booed by his own supporters, following the exhortations of a well-known sportswriter.

But it’s still desperate stuff. In fact, it’s dumb beyond belief, and as a Celtic supporter, it embarrasses the piss out of me that people now associate this sort of naff behaviour with the Bhoys.

By my reckoning, Arveladze (who was impressively kept quiet by Gary Breen in the game itself) is the seventh player to be jeered at our national stadium for having ties with Rangers.

As far as anyone can make out, the practice originated during a May 2000 friendly against Scotland, who comfortably beat us 2-1 that night. The Scots had three Rangers men in their line-up: Barry Ferguson, Billy Dodds and Neil McCann. Each of them had their every touch booed to the rafters. (It may not be an insignificant detail that at the time, Rangers were a far stronger side than Celtic, and had just won the SPL by 21 points.)

It didn’t happen again for nearly two years; I certainly don’t remember Arthur Numan and Giovanni van Bronckhorst receiving any abuse when Ireland beat Holland in September 2001 (although Jaap Stam, who’d left Man United weeks earlier, was jeered throughout).

Then Denmark came to town for a friendly in March of last year, a match I attended.

“Substitution for Denmark: number 7, Allan Nielsen, replaced by number 18, Peter Lovenkrands,” intoned the Lansdowne Road tannoy announcer as the second half kicked off.

Cue the jeers. Loud ones. Large sections of the crowd proceeded to boo Lovenkrands every time he got the ball. Except they weren’t; they were giving it to Peter Madsen, who had come on instead. The PA guy had got the names wrong. The real Lovenkrands came on half an hour later, again to mass booing.

Four weeks later, in another friendly, USA skipper Claudio Reyna got it. Then, a couple of months ago, in yet another friendly, it was the turn of Tore André Flo. And neither of these guys were even Rangers players at the time!

Celtic are inextricably linked with this country by 115 years of history, as we know. But the people who engage in this sort of shite go further: they view the two entities as extensions of each other. Ireland are basically Celtic in a World Cup context; Celtic are a club version of the national side. And, of course, it’s the national duty of every Irish person to support Celtic.

I swallowed a fair bit of this stuff myself when I was younger, but I don’t buy it any more. Supporting Celtic can often be a problematic business, due to the sheer number of eejits and wankdogs that follow them. Painful and all as it is to say it about the team you love, it’s undeniable at this stage that, in Ireland at least, they attract more gurriers and gobshites than any other club.

But I digress. The booing has been defended in certain quarters as a stance of defiance against Rangers’ supposedly sectarian transfer policy. The fact that they have never signed a southern Irish player is cited as evidence.

Oh, grow up, for fuck’s sake. I’m no admirer of Rangers myself, but what in the jaysus does any of this have to do with Ireland games? In what way is this a more worthwhile exercise than simply roaring on the Republic?

Should Arveladze ever take his holidays here (a most unlikely proposition after the events of last week), it’s not unreasonable to wonder if any of these people would take it upon themselves to hassle him in public. Would they go up to him in a pub and verbally abuse him, or worse?

Anyway, if their hatred of the Huns is so all-consuming, so intense, that they can’t leave it at the door for Ireland matches, why don’t they go to Glasgow and protest outside Ibrox? Or would that be too much like hard work?