Fitba Hell

THERE is proper meat inside my bridie. This is a surprise; on a Saturday afternoon I’m used to the factory-floor scrapings of the Scotch pie. OK, it’s lukewarm, but this is still relative luxury. Caterers at Dunfermline Athletic Football Club – you are to be congratulated.

You get used to the lowest common denominator when you go to watch football: cheerleaders going through the motions to mid-80s poodle rock; five-year-old boys missing their birthday message because the tannoy barely works; contracted security barely disguising their contempt for you. Given they way they are treated, it’s little wonder that football crowds are often mean-spirited and puerile.

There were 6,500 people at East End Park on Saturday, a figure that prompted an away-end chorus of “What a shitey home support.” But wait a minute – what else is going to pull so many people to a modest town in Fife? If an aspirant boy band or the Antiques Roadshow drew a few hundred people to Dunfermline, it would be a big event. But familiarity breeds contempt; Michael Aspel or a fake-tanned pop chancer might make the front page of the Dunfermline Press and West of Fife Advertiser; a Pars player will struggle to escape the back-page ghetto unless he lands in the sheriff court.

A crowd of 6,500 at East End Park is a long way from shitey: take away the sizeable Aberdeen support and that’s still thousands of people who troop loyally along year after year to follow a generally mediocre team. Someone behind the scenes has decided that these people deserve decent half-time fodder. One day they might even turn the ovens up a notch or two.

THERE was an acute sense of déjà vu last night: the red shirts would swarm toward the opposition goal; flailing legs would propel the ball back whence it came; the red shirts would regroup and surge forward again.

This unerring familiarity carried on into the second half: the fluid movement of the red shirts became agitated; the desperate punts upfield became more surefooted; and then, defying probability, the besieged team scored - and won. This was Celtic v Manchester United, but it might as well have been Scotland v France last month.

I once heard an American sports pundit decry 'soccer' because of its propensity for upsets. He missed the point. When an academic with too much time on his hands proved a few months ago that there were more shock results in football than in all other comparable sports, he was quantifying what millions of supporters of lesser teams already knew: a delicious potential for the unpredictable.

CELTIC player Shaun Maloney is thinking about moving to another team, probably in England. "The stench of greed is nauseating," wrote Daily Record columnist James Traynor in response this week.

Haud on a minute. Traynor and his ilk in the media constantly report speculation linking, say, a Scott Brown or Kevin Thomson with the Old Firm in such a way to suggest that moving to Glasgow would be entirely logical because it would mean going to a "bigger club". They collude in the bare-faced lies of players who say that money has nothing to do with it, a claim that, particularly given Rangers' current state, is looking increasingly flimsy.

George Orwell called it doublethink - when two apparently contradictory postions are repeated so often that people start to accept both without question.

"IS DAVID Beckham worthy of a knighthood?" asked a Radio 5 phone-in a few weeks ago. There was something bizarre about the ensuing debate that took me a while to work out. Then I realised: some thought him fitting of the Sir moniker; others did not – but only because of his footballing ability. Beckham isn’t fit to lace the boots of Sir Stanley or Sir Bobby, went the detractors. But all appeared united on one thing: as a man, he was entirely deserving of the honour.

Why does Beckham shuold be placed on the same lofty pedestal as Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and Laurence Olivier? His supporters listed a few of his virtues: he seems to love his children; his forays into the land of moisturiser and sarongs have subverted the macho culture of football; he mouths a few platitudes about charity. In short, the Radio 5 listeners said, “he’s a good role model”.

Beckham is not the most reproachful human being on the planet. But my argument against his case for a knighthood – notwithstanding reservations about the merits of an honours system overseen by an unelected head of state in the first place – is simple. Beckham, as we saw at his wedding, is one of the world’s most conspicuous consumers. This debate comes at a time when even Tony Blair has said that the scientific evidence of global warming is "overwhelming" and its consequences would be "disastrous". If we don’t get our act together, in forty years, our offspring will look at the water lapping round their feet and say: “Sir David? They really did have their heads rammed in the sand.”

INSIDIOUS hypocrisy in tabloid journalism No 792: the Scottish Sun's front-page piece today with the headline The Bravest Man in Ibrox.

Let's recap: a man ran onto the pitch at Ibrox during a game of football last night between Rangers and Israeli team Maccabi Haifa last night, waving a Palestinian flag above his head. Aha, I hear you say, there's the 'bravery' The Sun is talking about - it was ill-advised to make such a gesture in front of the away team's fans given the historical and political tinderbox that is the state of Israel, no?

Alas, no. The man's apparent bravery, The Sun sez, was to be wearing a t-shirt bearing a photo of the Pope. Never mind the recent breakthroughs against sectarianism at Ibrox - UEFA's charges against the club last season and, finally, an unequivocal stance against bigotry from David Murray - and never mind that no one seemed compelled to run on the pitch and leather the bearer of the offending t-shirt. The Sun smells sh*t and it wants to stir.

Cue a classic Sun quote - one that isn't phrased how anyone actually speaks and whose utterer remains conspicuously anonymous (i.e it's what the reporter wants someone to say, but in the absence of anyone actually having said it, just make it up and - bingo! - you've stood up your story}. In this case, 'one fan' said last night: "He must be very brave. He was surrounded by nearly 50,000 Rangers fans and was wearing a top with a picture of the Pope on it. It is amazing he was not lynched by the crowd before he invaded the pitch."

So, the message of the story, should I need to spell it out, is that our t-shirt-wearing eejit exhibited bravery because, given the chance, each of those 50,000 Rangers fans would have joined a mob intent on summarily executing him. (Sorry, I can't find any other definition in my dictionary for the verb "to lynch"). Yet when I saw the courageous soul's death-defying dash on Reporting Scotland tonight, all he seemed to be dodging was a wave of indifference and a smattering of indignant oaths.

Try not to laugh the next time you read a sanctimonious leader in The Sun about the 'scourge of sectarianism'.

THE Lisbon Lions should be hidden from public view until the 40th anniversary of their European Cup win comes around next year. Because Celtic keep parading the eight remaining members of that exceptional team to the point where the lustre of their supreme achievement is being increasingly dulled.

The fuss around their appearance at last night's game against Benfica may have had some justification - the Stadium of Light being where Celtic snapped open Inter Milan's seemingly impregnable defence in May 1967 - but even Neil Lennon seemed a little bemused by the focus being taken off the current team's Champions' League efforts.

I've found it a little sad to see the Lions wheeled out time and again for trifling prize draws, like obscure soap stars opening village fetes. You suspect those who organise the Lions' repeated public appearances do so from a gimlet-eyed fixation with the international branding of Celtic plc, not genuine wonder that a team could win football's greatest club prize with a squad born entirely within a 30-mile radius.

PAY a man in the region £100,000 a week and his hunger to excel will be compromised, especially in performing tasks outwith his normal duties - such as turning out for the national side. No matter the platitudes about playing for the shirt trotted out by Terry, Ferdinand, Neville et al, they all know they'll still be millionaires whatever happens with England. Frank Lampard's uncharacteristically insipid performances this summer were a case in point. Ashley Cole's autobiographical whinging about stingy Arsenal - providers of some of the planet's highest wage packets outside the Microsoft boardroom - rammed home that point.

But let's put the filty luchre to one side: can the England players be blamed for failing to muster much enthusiasm when they look out to the stands and see who they're representing?

I spent a few days in Frankfurt this summer, in the company of tens of thousands of England fans. During this time I was dumbfounded to read the papers flown in from London, with their reports of the good-natured tomfoolery of the national team's supporters. These weren't people to be ashamed of anymore, we were proudly told - they were proletarian cultural ambassadors who'd turned the cross of St George into a symbol of international goodwill.

What I saw was a mass of confrontational boors. There were decent individuals among them, but the over-riding atmosphere was one of ugly oneupmanship, predicated on the reduction of English history into a series of military triumphs. Fans wore chainmail and Tommy hats; they revelled in songs about the RAF "from England" shooting down German bombers; they invoked the sectarian conflict of Northern Ireland with leering abuse of the Pope. It was a curdled, confused nationalism - and one that failed to rouse the idle millionaires on the pitch from their slumber.

Modern English football still has, for now, the crowds and the lucrative sponsorship. But Croatia sensed an emptiness underneath the glitz - and ripped away the facade.