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What Was STV Trying To Say To Celtic Fans With This Bizarre Tweet Yesterday Morning?

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Earlier yesterday, someone at STV Sport tweeted something rather odd, and it’s been bugging me since I saw it. Others have commented, on Twitter, and none of us is any the wiser as to what the person responsible was getting at. It could be interpreted in many ways.

The link on that takes you to STV Sport’s own story about Bobby Madden getting the game on Sunday.

I think it’s a piece of trolling.

Are they trolling Celtic, Sevco or refs?

Us, I think.

I think it’s a nasty little tweet, one designed to mix it.

Note the time-stamp on that; it was put out at quarter past four in the morning. To do what? It was designed to take a shot and then be gone before the backlash started.

When we were kids we used to call that ring and run.

So the three games against Sevco this far have been refed by three different people, and Celtic have won all the games.

We’re the favourites to win this one too.

It reads to me like STV having a dig at Celtic fans for daring to question certain decisions lately. Either that or it’s some paranoid within their office offering the subtle opinion that we’re the establishment club now. If we were being as suspiciously minded as they sometimes take us for one could construct a narrative suggesting that it was an attempt to put pressure on Madden to stop what his counterparts couldn’t; an easy Celtic victory on the day.

The media is arrogant and spiteful at times.

A lot of its members think we’re all a bunch of goons. Phil had to defend himself yesterday in a spat with Matt Lindsay who had a go at “anonymous” people who keep saying Rangers are dead. Like Phil, I am not an anonymous person; I do this under my own name. My picture has been passed around various Sevco sites as a result. I live and work in Glasgow itself, and I will say this with absolute certainty, as someone who’s given this matter more study and thought that any of the hacks; Rangers is definitely dead.

I am not the only Celtic blogger who has written about Scottish refs.

I am not the only football blogger who has written about them.

The Daily Record invited Charlie Richmond to discuss those decisions at the weekend and he was as scathing as any of us. Is he a paranoid? Is he wrong to express his concerns? Are the numerous managers over the years, who’ve said that something needs to be done about standards?

In England they are about to launch video replays. Their own refs are streets ahead of ours, but they are not complacent and they strive for constant improvement. Over the years, top officials down there have spoken out about key decisions and helped bring clarity to them. Here, our referees manufactured an excuse to go on strike, for more money, and the media was four-square in their corner because it gave them a chance to blame us for it.

And why were we involved in that confluence of events?

Because a referee and his assistant lied to us about why a decision was made. They lied, right? They made stuff up. To cover what? We do not know, but they simply invented a story and asked us to swallow it and we were, quite rightly, not amused or impressed by that behaviour.

Martin Canning isn’t either. This is what he told the media about the ref’s “reason” for giving the penalty at the weekend. “The explanation I got after the game was that John Beaton saw that he had been pulled down which wasn’t the case.”

So John Beaten saw something that no-one else did.

In the same game as he thought Garner only deserved a yellow and that Fotheringham had no case to answer.

And we’re not allowed, we’re not supposed, to question that?

I am sick and tired of every effort at scrutiny of the people running our game getting dressed up into a Celtic – Sevco thing; you’d think these people were actively trying to hide something with the way they blow smoke like this.

Whoever sent that tweet yesterday morning, man up and tell us what it was about.

Come on, if you’ve got something to put out there, if STV Sport is taking an editorial line, then let’s hear what it is.

If STV wants to call us nutjobs or suggest something about our outlook, or stand up for refs, or say no referee in the country can save Sevco at the weekend, then there are ways to get that across. Do an editorial column and let it all out.

Because otherwise this is the mark of a gutless organisation, or individuals within it who think they are smart but know they’re just not smart enough.

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