Rangers: Wearing a blue top and singing Follow, Follow doesn't grant immunity from coronavirus

Indeed, the only basis for mass gatherings in the current conditions that makes much sense is if their purpose is to protest against the restrictions, as some lockdown sceptics and outright Covid deniers have.

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I think those are equally idiotic, but they at least have some internal logic. If you think the risks are minimal or non-existent, it sort of follows that you won’t mind banding together in a crowd to moan that the measures imposed to reduce them are excessive or unnecessary.

The epidemiologists have yet to suggest, however, that immunity from infection is provided by wearing a blue top and singing “Follow, Follow”. Not that I’m directing this at Rangers fans on the basis that they’re somehow uniquely terrible. I have no particular views on the habitués of Ibrox, though I grew up round the corner.

So before we go any further, I’d better say that exactly the same applies to the hundreds of Celtic fans who gathered outside Parkhead for a mass protest last November, and would apply to a hypothetical gathering of maskless Third Lanark fans, too, were such a thing to transpire.

While there were arrests made at the weekend, and in November, there didn’t seem to be much of a concerted police effort to break things up – as there has been at various anti-lockdown rallies. This isn’t entirely confined to football: not much was done to stop the Black Lives Matter protests, either, though they contravened the rules, and there have been a number of other instances of inconsistencies in policing the regulations.

I don’t know whether this has something to do with the difficulties in tackling unexpectedly large groups, as some police seem to have been suggesting, or with the dangers of turning mainly peaceful, if unruly, gatherings into rather more threatening and dangerous situations. Some of it, no doubt, is a desire to break out of lockdown fatigue. But in general, even before the pandemic, it has always been the case that anything involving football seems to get slightly different treatment from other, superficially similar, mass gatherings.

Given the amount of police time and resources, not to mention inept legislation and attention from politicians, specifically devoted to football, it’s rather surprising that no one seems to have anticipated the weekend’s events.

It’s true that no one’s in the stadium for matches, but it must have occurred to someone that fans might come out and celebrate, whatever the rules are. That should have been especially obvious given that Rangers fans have had a long route back to their present position. The highly attentive will have noticed there was mention of it on the television news and in the papers, even before it had happened, so it’s a shame no one from Police Scotland or in Holyrood seems to have jotted it down as something to bear in mind.

In terms of the pandemic, one problem is that the experience of a football crowd is largely dependent on it being a crowd. It’s possible to imagine socially distanced opera or theatre audiences (whether they are economically viable is a different question) but the point of a football stadium is in large part that it is communal.

Many more people go to museums, and to religious services, each week than attend football matches. But they don’t all do it at once in the same place. That, however, seems to be central to the game; quite a lot of commentators have complained that during lockdown it’s not just atmosphere and excitement that has been missing, but that the quality of play has been lacklustre. A crowd seems to be essential.

I find it difficult to understand this, but then I feel the same about other events, such as Glastonbury, that rely upon tens of thousands of people sharing the same experience. It’s not that I mind being in a crowd, but I don’t see what you might call the congregational appeal of the crowd in itself. Yet lots of fans clearly find the stands (where they still exist) as exciting as anything happening on the pitch.

As it happens, the biggest attendance at a football match, anywhere in the world and in the history of the game, was at Hampden, at the 1937 Scotland/England international, which was attended by 149,547 people, and an Old Firm match at Ibrox two years later comes in at fourth, with 118,567. So there’s plenty of evidence of historic popularity in Scotland, but even those impressive numbers can’t quite explain why football seems to have a special status when compared with other sports or large-scale events.

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Possibly some of it is due to some romantic and fanciful notion about it being central to working-class culture; an idea that, like the idea of working-class culture itself, certainly isn’t true now and almost certainly never was. Plenty of people like football, but there are probably more of them that like Beethoven; there are definitely more of them that like pop music, or visiting an art gallery, or watching Netflix.

The idea that classical music is somehow less authentically “of the people” than football is deeply patronising, and in any case actually going to matches – particularly since it became a Blairite affectation and season ticket prices went into the stratosphere – now seems to be every bit as middle-class as the Proms. Perhaps that’s the real reason for the special treatment.

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But there are some things, such as raves or huge street parties, which are obviously a bad idea in the current circumstances, and that almost everyone condemns. These scenes shouldn’t be judged or policed on a different basis, just because football is involved.

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