Nothing says “Celtic are on their holidays” more than headlines on away allocations for domestic matches. We had two bouts of such stories within about ten minutes on Friday afternoon as Kilmarnock and St. Johnstone both announced conflicting decisions to do with the travelling Hoops faithful’s allocation.
As we told you earlier, the Ayrshire side have cut our support at their ground from two stands to one. St. Johnstone, meanwhile, have added a stand of around 3,000 tickets to our following when we visit Perth.
It’s a bizarre place this wacky world of Scottish football.
Kilmarnock reduction in Celtic allocation is a bizarre decision
First of all, let me just say on record that it is completely up to these sides how many away fans they let into their ground on matchdays. I would be pretty annoyed if Rangers or Hearts started dictating to us which of their fans we should allow into our stadium. So that’s fair enough.
But when thousands of seats will lie empty when we visit Rugby Park in the first midweek fixture card of 2020, surely we’re doing something badly wrong.
St. Johnstone have been clever with their move, although they’ve not done it out of the kindness of their hearts like some may have you believe. They’ve spotted an opportunity to make a hell of a lot of money from our fans by selling more tickets to them. And that’s fair enough. If more of our supporters get to see the team in action at McDiarmid, that’s a fair deal.
But Killie’s decision is a really baffling one. We’ve taken 9,000 odd supporters there on our past five visits. We would have done so easily later this month. They’re effectively chucking away thousands of pounds for no reason.
And the Celtic support may remember that if they ever come crawling back for more of our money. We haven’t always filled both stands at their ground. You only have to go back to the Ronny Deila era when selling out one stand was a bit of a struggle. They should be careful what they wish for.
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