article: I called it a circus act, a freak show. I said it had all the weird fascination of one of those Victorian Odditoriums with Wang the Human Unicorn and Ella the infamous Camel Girl. The appeal of an Old Firm derby is not so much the football but the grisliness surrounding the football. That's the marketability of this game - the rot. It's not known as one of the most storied derbies in world football because of the quality of the action on the field. Maybe it was back in the day - undoubtedly it was - but that hasn't been the case for a long time now. Those who get drawn to it do so because of its essential madness, its toxicity, its poison. That's an uncomfortable admission given the nature of some of the things that go on around this match - the bigotry, the violence, the viciousness and hysteria on social media. But it's the truth. At its craziest, it's football's equivalent of the Jim Rose Circus. And, love it or loathe it, for the next three months, there will be little escape from it. It's back - or soon will be. It was inevitable. Plenty have missed it. Plenty of others have not. It is possible to celebrate its return while also having an acute dread. That might seem like a contradiction, but in the strange world of the Old Firm, it makes some kind of sense. By the time it comes around, it will have been almost three years since the previous meeting of these two clubs. Expect that to be reflected in the acreage of newsprint and radio hours that will be expended on this Scottish League Cup semi-final. Before a previous meeting, I spent the week counting the number of newspaper pages given over to the fixture, from the Monday before to the Monday after. I gave up halfway through when the count had soared to over 100. One title had 27 pages dedicated to the game on one day alone. After a gap of three years, the mind boggles as to what lays ahead in terms of countdown. If you stop your stopwatch at the point when it was obvious that they would be drawn together, it probably it took a fraction of a millisecond for the first tweets to land, like blows to the jaw of their rivals. Media playback is not supported on this device Some among the Celtic support are steadfast in their belief that a unique occurrence is going to take place next year - the first meeting of the sides. Something akin to virtual spontaneous combustion happened on social media. As commentators ran through the gamut of Things We Cannot Say (TWCS), there was a predictable and plentiful response. "Previous meetings" - there's been none. "Rivalry" - doesn't exist. "Rangers" - no such club. This coterie of Celtic fans say they see this League Cup semi-final as a match with no history. We must assume, by extension, that they believe the Celtic crowd at Hampden for the semi-final will
summary: A few years back, in the days before former owner Craig Whyte ever darkened Rangers' door and in a time when Charles Green was selling his bombast elsewhere, I wrote a column about the nature of the Old Firm derby as I saw it.