Gallus Glasgow I: Ibrox

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Ibrox Stadium

Ibrox is the obvious “I” for Glasgow, but I confess I have never been there – well, I’ve been to the area but not inside the stadium. My interest in football (soccer) is less than zero, and this is the home of Rangers, one of Glasgow’s three professional clubs. Together with Celtic, it makes up the Old Firm and the rivalry between them is deep. It’s not just sport – it spills over with a minority of fans into sectarianism: originally, Rangers (founded 1872) attracted Protestant Scots while Celtic (1887) represented Catholic Irish immigrants. For some, this division is still important and has been known to result in violence at Old Firm matches – which don’t happen very often these days because the teams are in different leagues (a long story which I don’t pretend to understand). There’s nothing gallus about violence.

If someone asks you which Glasgow football team you support, the wisest answer is probably Partick Thistle.

J tomorrow, and I’ll take you to my old workplace.

A to Z Challenge 2015, Scotland, UK ,

23 Comments »

  3. That design is visually striking, too bad it’s only being used for a sports stadium! LOL. (I confess that I am not a sports fan in general – I don’t understand how people can get so worked up over something that is just a game.) 🙂

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  4. Well since I’m in America we have to deal with American Football far in the lead… Then (I just had to look it up) Baseball is actually 2nd. Then basketball, hockey, college sports (football and basketball) and then pro soccer (football in the rest of the world). Minneapolis just got a pro soccer franchise and we are building a stadium… we are also building a new football stadium and that gets much more attention.

    But nothing in America comes anything near the rivalries, passion, violence of other countries in relation to their local soccer team.

    My husband is obsessed with baseball so I do go to one game every year with him at Target Field (he has lots of baseball friends to go to other games with) where I usually spend most of my time playing with various camera apps on my phone and then I walk around and scope out all the different options for overpriced food.

    All in all stadiums of every type are usually quite ugly.

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    • It seems nobody commenting is that keen on sport! I managed to be out of the country for both the 2012 Olympics and last year’s Commonwealth Games and many people thought I was very strange. I just can’t imagine getting worked up enough about anything to become violent. Through religion into the mix, as here, and it can become very poisonous.

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  7. I thought it was a factory maybe converted into a mall:) I have no interest in sports overall so we are in like thinking. What is funny, sad is I have a book about 501 disasters (ok I like reading about this) and there was a sports section-most of the disasters happened during football (soccer) games

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  9. That’s a cool building! When I was younger I loved watching all kinds of sports, but I’ve totally lost interest.

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