100%.
There is nothing that gets the adrenaline and the battle fever going more than being at an OF game when you look across and see the enemy within the walls of Ibrox.
The build up before the game with both sets of fans ready to go to war with each other, trading songs back and forth, with all four corners of the stadium singing the same song but seemingly out of sync at times, because the noise is so deafening you can hardly hear your own voice, let alone what the other end of the ground are singing. Then there’s that moment when that lot are singing so loud that you can’t even make out what song our own fans are trying to get going, until it filters round the ground and then Ibrox to a man drowns them out completely as they belt into Derry’s Walls or the like.
There is a venom to the atmosphere that you only get through having thousands of your enemy trading blows with you. 800 just doesn’t cut it. Nor does packing them away in the club deck where you can’t see them. I want to look into the whites of their eyes as kick off approaches and when we go one, two, three nil up. There is nothing better than winning the war and having an all out party in front of them all looking absolutely pig sick, before they eventually trudge out one by one.
In all honesty, the crescendo of noise that’s created between the two sets of fans when they had the whole Broomloan was something else. Particularly the way Ibrox is designed with the fans packed in so tightly and right on top of the pitch. I’m not suggesting we go back to that, but having no away fans is ruining the game as a spectacle. I’ll never forget my first experience of it as a kid and we shouldn’t take that away from the next generation.