We have to say the reaction to Fabio Silva’s ‘less of the lip’ gesture after his goal for Rangers on Sunday has been very eye-opening.
Eye-opening about the fact a portion of Rangers’ fanbase is as hypocritical as any other in places, and there’s some amount of sanctimonious, pontificating individuals in our support.
Let’s paint the picture:
Silva, the model of simulation football, the guy who has put in one notable shift as a Rangers player and that was against his boyhood rivals Benfica, and who has shown a notable level of arrogance and disdain for the club with a real lack of any quality.
He has roundly become one of the most unpopular players, failing to back up his ridiculous histrionics and cheating with performances to compensate, and having yet another mediocre display, he scores an admittedly decent goal.
His reaction?
To dig at the fans with a ‘shut up’ gesture.
Now, we are well aware fans are horrible in places, and some of the things said and shouted at the footie are vile, abusive and unacceptable.
However, that IS the law of the football jungle – we’re not saying what they say is right, but we’re defending our supporters’ right to criticise players who don’t deliver.
We do NOT defend any Rangers player who slurs them back for it. That includes any of Ibrox Noise’s ‘favourites’, like Yilmaz, Sterling, Balogun or Dessers – doesn’t matter, you can’t mouth off to fans.
These are elite, privileged players, in this case a 21-year-old boy who is on about £100,000 a week all-in, and who lives subsequently on a different planet to William Punter in the stand, the labourer on £20,000 a year, who spends his hard-earned on a season ticket.
Of course he’s going to give lip to the players who don’t put the shift in.
And it’s part of football.
What disquiets us worse is the pontificating eedjits in our support defending Silva over this action – the same ones who are disgusted every time he’s picked in the XI.
It’s like the snowflake woke brigade has taken over and now the fans aren’t allowed to criticise a waster of a player.
Indeed, these fans are picking Silva over their own peers.
Now, there’s an irony. You may well suggest Ibrox Noise is doing something parallel ourselves – picking one set of fans to exalt, and another to castrate. Hypocritical, right?
You might think because we don’t like Silva, and we don’t, we’re siding with the fans in the stands who criticised him.
Well yes we are, and we make no apology for that.
We want players who show grace to our shirt, who don’t cheat, who perform, and who show they’re worth being selected.
If you’re not doing these things, you still have every right to smear the fans for criticising if you want, but it’s an immensely unwise course of action.
Did we see Dessers do this earlier in the season when he too was being slaughtered? Did Lammers? Even Goldson, getting a torrent of crap, rose above it to just get on with things.
No, Silva did the dumb thing – he rose to it and gave some back.
He told Rangers fans, in their thousands, to shut up.
He can say it if he likes, but the fans defending his actions (and there’s a lot) and taking his side clearly have more interested in supporting shysters in our shirt than the fans who spend the money on their wages.
There’s one more thing – whenever Ibrox Noise criticises Philippe Clement, the response 70% of the time, from those same fans, is to slag off the players, to tell us they’re responsible for the garbage we’re seeing out there.
Yet they then DEFEND those players who aren’t performing.
We saw one punter say ‘that poor boy is trying his best’ – goodness, if Silva is a ‘poor boy’ we’ve got it all wrong we guess.
But hey, it’s all about opinions, right?