I don't want to stand with pyro wielding ultras when taking my boys to games and 'fan culture' is a myth

Call me old-fashioned – and many do – but when I go to a match with my boys rather than my laptop, I want to watch the game.

I want to cheer when my team scores. I want to give the lads a hug. Amazingly, they want to hug me back. I want to moan about the price of a nuclear-zapped pie that rips the lining off the top of my mouth. If my team lose, I want to moan about how rubbish they are all the way home. All of which is perfectly normal behaviour, I reckon.

What I don’t want is to be standing next to a kid dressed in black with a snood and a hood as he holds aloft what looks like a big eff-off distress signal, flaring like the Grangemouth oil refinery and belching out acrid smoke that seeps into my lungs and stings my eyes. I don’t want to be peering through a haze for the first 10 minutes, wondering who messed up for the goal we lost or who rattled in that 30-yarder for my team.

Of course, there will be those who say this is more hand-wringing from someone who has spent the last 30 years in the good seats, getting paid to watch football. Which is true.

But when I am off duty and paying to watch football – and I do – why should I have to accept the wee tyro with the pyro in the row in front of me has the right to spoil my enjoyment just to enhance his?

‘Oh, but it’s the spectacle. It can be done safely if the authorities work hand in hand with the pyrotechnicians’, say advocates for allowing this trend to continue. ‘It’s fan culture’.

Well, it’s not this fan’s culture. What about those like me who aren’t interested, who just want to go to the game? The Scotland match against Norway the other night was a perfect example of how a pre-match spectacle can be organised without pyros.

The ‘We’ll Be Coming’ tifo that covered