Search icon

Football

21st May 2018

Rangers’ Michael O’Halloran responds to backlash over photo with Celtic fans

Chris Sutton only antagonised Rangers fans more with his response

Ben Kiely

Michael O’Halloran chose the wrong place to sit in Hampden Park on Saturday in the eyes of a lot of Rangers fans.

Michael O’Halloran watched on from the crowd as Celtic defeated Motherwell 2-0 in Saturday’s Scottish Cup final. The victory saw the club achieve an unprecedented double treble following an unbeaten domestic season. For the second successive season, Celtic are the Scottish Premiership, Scottish Cup and Scottish League Cup champions.

You can imagine how much this amazing feat must piss off the other big club in Glasgow. When Rangers fans they saw one of their own sitting with the Hoops, some of them lost the plot.

A photo of O’Halloran surrounded by Celtic supporters in Hampden Park began doing the rounds online at the weekend. O’Halloran hasn’t exactly flourished at Rangers. He has spent most of his time there on loan. He’s only played one game for them this season. However, that didn’t stop Rangers fans from calling for him to get the boot. The fact that he was once on the books at Celtic at youth level probably didn’t help matters.

“It doesn’t look good.”

The abuse kept piling up to the point where O’Halloran had to address it. As reported by The Daily Record, his agent Kenny Moyes claimed that O’Halloran regrets making what happened in Hampden Park.

“Michael didn’t realise he would be surrounded by Celtic fans but hindsight is a great thing and he now regrets the decision as he accepts it doesn’t look too good.”

“I know he is taking some stick from the Rangers fans but he absolutely wasn’t at Hampden as a Celtic supporter. He’s a Rangers player.”

“He is concerned at how it looks to the Rangers supporters but he thought he would be in a neutral section and didn’t realise.”

Celtic legend Chris Sutton may have had the best response to the debacle. He couldn’t resist seizing the opportunity to score a dig against the Blue half of Glasgow.

Cue the Richard Keys’ ‘It was just b*nter’ Vine.

The FootballJOE quiz: Were you paying attention? – episode 10