Celtic Soccer Crew. CS Gas

From the peak to the decline in a moment of madness …

By Holywell Street and CSC

Saturday 28th November 1987

Going with our Football Terrace section. We’d like to cover an article on the Celtic Soccer Crew, who we had and still have a good relationship with at Holywell Street. We realise that soccer casuals right or wrong were a big part of the eighties terrace culture. We’ll be revisiting this and doing a few articles with them. The lads were looking at putting another book together, but after having dialogue with us, they decided to contribute to the blog.

Here, we want to cover a story from the late eighties when Celtic visited Easter Road to play Hibs on November 28th 1987. There had been a long feud with the Celtic and Hibs casuals in the last few years leading up to this date.

On this day there was disturbance before and after the match, but significantly a CS Gas canister was thrown into the Hibs end during the second-half of the game by the Celtic Casuals. CSC: ‘The aim was simple, take the number one spot from Hibs’ This is no story of glory, it’s very much a mixed bag. We got together with the remaining lads to talk about a game changing and life changing incident that had lasting effects for all concerned. A story of corruption and fit-ups also a bias Establishment.

CSC

‘After the rubbish that’s been written about us, we don’t need to cash in on books with publishing politics to put a few things straight’

A lot has been said about this incident and a lot of stuff ignored and airbrushed over. We’d like to put a few records straight with on a game, a game which must be up there with any of the biggest Hooligan incidents in history. We’ll do this by giving accurate accounts from the lads that were there; those involved, arrested, remanded and jailed for the incident.

Shaun

We’d planned on going through early for the match, there were about 40 of us that got the train early in the morning from Queen Street to Edinburgh. We got there but got off at Haymarket  – the stop before Waverley, which is actually Hearts territory of Edinburgh. A lot of us on the train that day were wearing Harris Tweed blazer jackets and polo-necks. We were just going for a good day out. When we got off at Haymarket there happened to be a few Hearts lads just hanging about , so they got chased down the road, but that was just a side issue to what went on that day. They must have been hanging about the station for their away match to Ibrox to play Rangers. We then made our way along to Princes Street and the top of Easter Road.

Francie

We went through early as we were looking for some Hearts lads that had be noising up a girl who went with us – she used to be Hearts but was now with Celtic, so that was the reason to get off at Haymarket and see if we could catch them early.

Lee

We wore Tweed jackets and polo-necks; it was like some student look at the time also chino’s were on show and Burlington socks some of us were even in shirt and tie. This was a massive day out with a lot of lads that hadn’t been at the match for a while. The aim was simple, to take the number one spot away from Hibs.

 _{To be continued.}