Did you know it’s still pantomime season in Glasgow? It’s the Old Firm tomorrow — ‘oh no it isn’t,’ ‘oh yes it is’ they cry.

How on Earth did it come to this? It’s safe enough to say Celtic are playing Rangers in the League Cup semi-final but casually throw in the “Old Firm” tag and there’s hell to pay.

Why? Simply put, Rangers’ downward spiral into administration and liquidation almost exactly three years ago has spawned a war of words — and sparked a PR battle — over the identity of the Ibrox club.

“How can an outfit which went out of business be part of anything old?” “Rangers died, Rangers are a new co” and so on say the Celtic support and others in Scottish football.

Ridiculous, cry the other camp. Rangers are called Rangers, they play at Ibrox and wear light blue. How can they not be Rangers?

The lines of argument here are over whether the football club or merely the business that ran Rangers was liquidated back in 2012. It’s highly nuanced and oft-times explosive stuff which causes fans and journalists alike all manner of grief.

Unsurprisingly Rangers supporters are determined to preserve their history but others will simply not let the matter rest.

A full-page advert paid for by Celtic fans appeared in one Scottish newspaper last Sunday saying they had “no track record” of playing against their semi-final opponents. 

In turn this caused various Rangers greats and former Celt Kenny Dalglish to debunk the notion of a new club.

Much of this squabbling is about the circumstances of what happened back in 2012.

The club under David Murray and then Craig Whyte had played pretty fast and loose with its approach to tax over a long number of years before HMRC started showing an interest in the goings-on in Govan.

Rangers popped up on the taxman’s radar thanks to an accounting trick called employee benefit trusts. Known as EBT’s these were loans (or side payments) to players which fell within a grey area of the law.

The prospect of owing tens of millions to HMRC in back-dated taxes dissuaded serious money men from buying the club from David Murray, who eventually sold to Whyte for a nominal £1.

He was described in the press as having “wealth off the radar” when he took the helm in 2011. A few short months later the whole operation — unable to meet monthly tax demands — was rolled up.

Rangers were then allowed to begin life again on the bottom rung of the senior ladder of the Scottish game but in the months and years since they have lurched from one crisis to the next, a sour parody of their glorious past.

This week alone there has been another emergency £10 million injection from Mike Ashley, the Newcastle United billionaire owner, as Rangers struggle with falling attendances and poor form in the Scottish Championship.

To get some idea of the scale of this story, no club in England comes close in size and influence. 

Put Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea together and still you don’t have the reach of Rangers.

Celtic are massive of course but Rangers were for much of the 20th century nothing short of a major plank of Scottish cultural identity.

Every bit as important as the Scottish legal system and the independent Church of Scotland, Rangers were the team of mainstream Scotland and Scots well beyond Glasgow.

The problem for many folk with progressive values, and many within the Labour movement, was that this huge club was also very exclusive — exclusively Protestant that is.

In short Rangers, for many decades, pursued a policy of social apartheid against the Roman Catholic Irish immigrants and their descendants who had flocked to the city.

Between WWI and the end of the 1980s you could not be a Catholic and play for Rangers, nor in fact could you be employed at Ibrox in any post.

Thankfully those days are long gone. 

Many Catholics from all over the world have played in light blue and indeed Irish striker Jon Daly has been a success at the club since arriving in 2013.

However, there is still a feeling in other parts of the game, and in wider society, that what has happened at Ibrox is karma. An ugly old beast has got its comeuppance.

All in all no matter how we describe the match tomorrow one thing is for certain, there has never been a meeting between the blue of Rangers and the green and white of Celtic quite like this one.

Douglas Beattie is author of Rival Games: Inside the British Derby published by Know the Score books.