The farce Old Firm friendly scheduled for November is close to a bust after revelations emerged today that there are major issues behind the scenes and the launch, on the 15th of this month (brought exclusively to you by Ibrox Noise) was deeply premature.

The issues behind the scenes we’d wager is a lack of uptake and the protest petitions, and we cannot get out of our heads the image of Mitchell and McDonald cosying up together.

Look, don’t get us wrong – we’re well aware there’s been deep friendships between good Rangers and Celtic men over the year – the bond between Walter, Ally and Tommy is legendary and Billy McNeill too was a good man from the other side.

And we even saw Stavros and Graeme Souness having a meal together, not to mention our own Giovanni with Celtic’s manager as well.

So, let’s not being over the top, zealous, small-minded or tribal to reject all that good men like these stood for.

But there’s also a line.

The hatred between both clubs has rarely been stronger, and with current sentiment as bad as it is, one thing there has never been is a ‘friendly’ between Rangers and Celtic, and certainly not one in celebration of one particular side and their manager.

We are well aware of the Lyon tournament that Rangers and Celtic took part in not long ago, but it wasn’t in honour of Celtic or their manager, AND we weren’t to face each other either.

In this case, we’ve been paid somewhere between £3M-£10M (depending on who you read) to sell out to a tournament in the name of Stavros and his team.

That’s a bit different.

Furthermore, Celtic are likely to lose a gigantic court case in the near future over the child sex abuse scandal and frankly we don’t really want to be associated with any of this.

So the fact the tournament is falling apart before it even started is fine by us.

Or better yet, just remove Celtic from the equation and we’ll happily take part…