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Tony Cascarino Gives Lessons In Irony As He Offers A Critique Of Griffiths Scoring Record

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Tony Cascarino has criticised the standard of Scottish football, citing, as his example, the number of goals Leigh Griffiths has been able to score in the league.

That’s right. Tony Cascarino.

Who cost us £1.1 million as a striker, and who we later swapped for a central defender.

The best bit about signing Cascarino has always been that we ended up with Tom Boyd, and if there was ever a harsher verdict delivered on a forward in the history of our club I have yet to hear of it.

His goal “haul” in a Celtic shirt was four.

Griffiths has topped that inside some weeks at the club.

For anyone to criticise him on any basis is ridiculous, but for a non-scoring striker to … well that’s a pretty special kind of stupidity, right there.

I remember Cascarino, his goal at Ibrox being the highlight of what was an otherwise dismal season at our club. I remember his bizarre comments in the aftermath of his move to Chelsea that we “played too much football” for him, at a time when we were under the management of Liam Brady.

His signing was a full-on disaster.

A lot of players who have played up here have praised the standard of our game, top players who’ve said it was tougher than a lot of people realise. Others can’t wait to put the boot in the second they’re out of the country, and most often they’re the guys who took their money and produced the sum total of nil. Cascarino was one of those.

He’s now one of the darlings of the broadcasting sect, making a living on shows like TalkSport where he’s essentially paid for talking up the sheer brilliance of the game south of the border, with its over bloated salaries and ridiculous self-regard.

Griffiths is on the way to becoming a fantastic player.

No-one who’s watched him recently can deny that.

Gordon Strachan’s myopia in leaving him out of the Scotland team – which Cascarino cited – is one of the reasons why the national team failed to qualify for the Euro’s …the Irishman appears to have left that out of his thinking.

I get tired reading the English football intelligentsia (and Cascarino is more English than Irish, let’s not kid ourselves here) talk down our national sport, but for this guy to have a pop at Griffiths is beyond parody. I don’t remember Scottish football being exactly world beating in the era in which Cascarino graced us with one season of his presence and where Griffiths has succeeded he absolutely and unequivocally failed.

But then, this is the kind of nonsense we have to put up with.

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