Club privately supports Bhoycott

Joe O’Rourke of the Celtic Supporters Association is confident that his organisation has the full backing of the club in their plan to boycott the match at Rugby Park against Kilmarnock on Wednesday March 2nd.

He told me:
“Our committee voted in favour eleven for and one against. We will put the proposal to our branches on Sunday. We are confident of between 90 % to 100% backing for this.”

He has already met with senior personnel in the club who are very supportive of this action.
He is also meeting with Neil Lennon tomorrow (thursday) and if can be assured by the Celtic manager that an away match with no Celtic supporters (or very little) present will not have an adverse affect on the team then the “Bhoycott” is on.
I put it to Joe that this was perhaps a tactic in search of an objective.
He didn’t accept that and stated very strongly to me that all that the Association was asking for was “transparency, fairness and accountability.”

I asked why the Kilmarnock match had been selected?
“ Kilmarnock is a good target for us. It ticks all of our boxes. It’s a Wednesday night, it’s on Sky and Michael Johnstone their Chairman was on the Committee that gave Lenny the six match ban.”

I asked what does this take for this to go away?

“We want a meeting with Stewart Regan. We asked for one at the time of Dougie Dougie and he never got back to us. We want a meeting with him and written assurances that we will stop being cheated by his officials. We are 33% of the total support in Scotland are we are sick of being cheated.”

I then asked him if this was a one off demonstration he said that it almost certainly WASN’T a one off.

“This might is the start of a rolling campaign. We have other targets in mind. Club Chairmen who have put their clubs in the frame, Thompson at Dundee United, Boyle at Motherwell.”
When I pointed out that this boycott could, if it was sustained put an SPL club out of business and were the Association willing to have this happen Joe O’Rourke was unequivocal.
“If that’s what it takes for us to get fair treatment then yes!”
Joe pointed out the lack of transparency at the SFA and gave the appeals panel that looked at the James Forrest red card.
“That was an ex-ref, ex-manager and ex-player. We don’t know who they are. What if the ex-ref was Mike McCurry and the ex-manager was John Brown and the ex-player was Gordon Dalziel. Would they be fair and impartial to a Celtic player? To Celtic? Would they?”
He continued:
“It’s done in secret so we don’t know. So we want transparency. We want fairness and we want written assurances that the old days are over. We’ve been cheated for too long!”