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WHY I HATE RANGERS - September 1995

Actually, I don't hate Rangers. Oh, alright then, I do. Any team who can make such a hard job out of winning the Scottish Premier League given the piss-poor standard of opposition at the moment has to be a bit shit, after all. But the worst thing about Rangers isn't Rangers. It's Rangers fans.

Where can you start on Rangers fans? The horrific religious bigotry spewed from the Ibrox stands, where every song at every game is about a battle fought in another country over three centuries ago, is well documented, but then Celtic are little better and nobody hates them (except Rangers fans). Then again, most Celtic fans wouldn't be proud to be broadcast on national television burning their own team's scarf and season ticket because they'd just bought a player who was a Catholic (as hundreds of Hun fans did when Rangers signed Mo Johnston in the 80s).

Or maybe it's their proud flying of the Union Jack - a repellent symbol of centuries of treachery and oppression so despised everywhere else in Scotland that the SFA had to bin it and its loathsome cousin God Save The Queen and adopt embarrassing shortbread-tin tartan shanty Scotland The Brave as the national side's anthem to avoid having the team booed before every international match - that causes hackles to rise.

No, what really gets my goat is the FACT that Rangers have the least loyal, most gloryhunting support in the whole of Britain, if not the world. Back in the late 70s and most of the 80s, Rangers were shit. Not shit in the 'top of one big pile of shit' way they are now, but REALLY shit. Losing to St Mirren shit. But given that (for ugly sectarian reasons) most Rangers supporters clubs actually feature the word 'Loyal' in their names, you might expect that their fans would get behind them in times of trouble (like Aberdeen's did this season, where our average attendance in a relegation play-offs season was HIGHER than the previous year's, when we were in the running for the title right up to the end). You might, in that case, be surprised to read that the attendance for a home league match against Partick Thistle towards the end of one season during that period narrowly failed to reach the giddy heights of 1,500. Yes, that's ONE thousand FIVE hundred, out of today's average gate of 40,000 plus. Loyal? Blackburn fucking Rovers have more loyal fans than that. Scum.

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