Hugh Keevins: Time for fans to stand up for what's right

Dundee’s Gary Harkins is about to have the kind of week a psychiatrist would pay good money to study and use as the subject of a thesis on the human condition.

On Wednesday night Gary will play at Celtic Park and be given the most rapturous reception a Dundee player has had in that setting since Albert Kidd played there for the Dark Blues in 1986.

That was the year in which Kidd scored two goals at home to Hearts and prevented the Tynecastle side from pipping Celtic to the league title. David Hay’s Celtic took five goals off St. Mirren on that fateful last day of the season and Kidd publicly owned up to being a lifelong Hoops fan to put icing on the champions’ cake.

Fate then decreed that Dundee were Celtic’s visitors on the opening day of the following season when the league flag was unfurled. Kidd was cheered from the moment when he came out to have a pre-match look at the pitch until he left town on the team bus at full time.

A similar experience awaits Harkins this midweek.

But Saturday will bring another game in Glasgow for Dundee, this time against Rangers at Ibrox in the quarter finals of the Scottish Cup, and Gary will then undertake the journey from rapture to rancour.

He will be heckled, harangued and hung out to dry from start to finish by a crowd who will be counting the hours until they can vent their feelings about the player.

What has placed Harkins in the position where he is idolised and despised and equal measure is the comment he made about Rangers being a new club he had no previous experience of playing against.

The player’s tongue was clearly embedded in his cheek when he made his jocular reference to what is a deadly serious topic for the Rangers support and there is no middle ground able to be occupied on this particular issue.

Those who would wish to taunt their rivals maintain that Rangers going into liquidation and then re-entering the game in the lowest division of the SPFL meant they were no relation to the club’s former incarnation and subsequently had no previous history of achievement.

This can’t be described as banter because those who take offence at the very suggestion of a new club having come into being can find no trace of humour whatsoever in any counter argument.

That’s why the heart sank when Harkins’ mischievious remark arrived in the public domain. Cue social media outrage, cue jammed switchboard in the Superscoreboard studio. Cue mayhem when the bearded one steps down from the Dundee bus outside Ibrox on Saturday.

The argument over Rangers’ status has raged for years and will, in all probability, continue to rage until the end of time because that is the nature of the rivalry which exists within the game.

Harkins will simply have to endure the verbal abuse that’s coming his way and think twice before attempting to lighten up any conversation with an impromptu visit to the world of social commentary in future.

And so long as the abuse he takes from the crowd is no different from the full on fulmination that comes the way of many players on a weekly basis then no-one will be any worse for the experience. We’re all big boys and girls and if you can’t tolerate industrial language in unison then a football ground really isn’t the place for those of a sensitive nature.

Josh Magennis? Now that’s different.

The Kilmarnock and Northern Ireland forward reported to police at the weekend what he complained was racial abuse from a Hearts supporter during his team’s defeat at Tynecastle.

The abuse had nothing to do with Magennis’ skin colour, but his nationality. Police have now asked for supporters’ help in tracking down the culprit.

What a chance this is for fans to hit back in their own defence. Supporters complain they are over-policed and made to feel like criminals when they attend matches today. They have also howled down plans, now binned, to introduce facial recognition paraphernalia in order to cut down on trouble makers.

Here’s the opportunity, therefore, to make a point about the benefits of self-policing within the game. A group of people who were sitting in the near vicinity of Magennis’ verbal assailant on Saturday must know exactly who he is. Turn him in and help clean up Hearts’ recently troubled image.

Crowd trouble at Tynecastle has increased the club’s police bill by £50,000 per home game.

Club owner Ann Budge had to apologise to Ross County after one of their supporters buses came under attack last October.

And the SPFL are currently investigating Dundee United’s complaint that their manager, Mixu Paatelainen was the victim of excessive verbal abuse inside Tynecastle. Just bring a bad influence to justice and we can all move on after a job well done.

Ann Budge, for one, deserves that much after all she’s done to restore pride in the club she saved from an uncertain future.

Tynecastle is the only place where, over the course of a lengthy career in press boxes. I have ever been physically attacked. It’s a long story, but I’ll give you the truncated version.

Celtic win 2 – 1 in the capital and I’m into my post-match analysis with the help of my old Superscoreboard friend Davie Provan when a departing spectator lands the blow which sends me backwards. Had my fall not been broken by a more sympathetic Hearts fan a glittering career might have come to a nasty end.

The moral to the story is the club located the errant supporter by seat number and a ban from the ground was imposed without any delay.

If there is a will then there is a way when it comes to rooting out people who tarnish a club’s image. The Hearts fans who know the identity of Magennis’ tormentor should find the will to do something about him.

As for you, Gary, you will need to prove that dog’s abuse is like water off a duck’s back to mix animal metaphors. Good luck with that.