It may have been fireworks and excitement ever since Philippe Clement arrived at Ibrox to take charge of Rangers, but sometimes those fireworks aren’t really worth the hassle.
That’s what a pair of PSV Eindhoven fans have discovered this week anyway after they were sentenced to 120 hours community service and three months’ probation after setting off fireworks outside Rangers’ hotel in 2022.
Eindhovens Dagblad cover the situation today after the long-delayed court case was finally seen 18 months after the initial incident.
They explain that a now 26-year-old resident of Heezen and a man from North Holland had set off fireworks outside of Rangers hotel at around 2am in the morning before their clash.
Philippe Clement’s side, then managed by Giovanni van Bronckhorst of course, took on the Dutch club in the second leg of their Champions League play-off in Eindhoven on 24th August 2022, with a goal from Antonio Colak seeing them take a 1-0 win and qualification.
The opposition fans had planned to stop that happening though, setting off fireworks outside the hotel the night before in the hope of disrupting Rangers’ preparations.
It didn’t work and instead they were caught and charged by police, with the public prosecutor initially setting a potential jail term of six to nine months.
That punishment was set not because of the disruption but because of the type of fireworks they used, with prosecutors labelling them dangerous and believing the incident fell outside of the remit of ‘mischief’.
The pair were immediately arrested after the incident, with a third 25-year-old man later arrested after he texted them that he would finish the job.
The case had been delayed until now when they finally faced a judge and pleaded their case, with the initial two insisting ‘they felt sorry’ and ‘their lives had now taken a different turn’. Indeed, after the Rangers incident, one has even seemingly given up on football completely.
His compatriot, on the other hand, still attends games but insisted he tries to ‘distance (himself) as much as possible from the things that happen around it’. In other words, he won’t be repeating his exploits from before the Rangers game any time soon.
That seems to have convinced the public prosecutor, who spared them jail and instead called for 240 hours of community service, the maximum possible, and a two-month suspended prison sentence. The judge proved to be more lenient and landed on 120 hours community service and three months’ probation.
