Discredited Hack Forgets The Games That Killed Rangers

This week, we had one of those bizarre moments that seems to define Scottish football at times.

The discredited former hack Hugh Keevins apparently forget, entirely, the four matches that all but destroyed Rangers as an institution and a football club.

Keevins, who spent much of his career disdaining social media before leaving The Daily Record to become a blogger for a radio station, recently appeared on Twitter, to much bafflement amongst Scottish football fans who had become accustomed to hearing him tell the world how full of idiots the internet is.

I guess he felt it needed one more.

His career as a journalist ended last year, and can probably best be summed up by two things; his Wikipedia entry, which is a mere two lines long and the fact that when asked to choose a career highlight for a book he didn’t pick a story he had broken but the time he was kicked out of the Celtic Club in London Road.

That about covers it.

Over the years he gave us many hilarious moments, like when he declared the league race to be “over” in November 2007 or when he described Kaunas as “a two bob team from a two bob country” before they knocked Rangers out of Europe in 2008 or when he predicted that Atletico Madrid would turn Celtic over in 2011 and then, when challenged on the radio, could not name a single member of their first team squad.

In the course of his tenure at The Record and The Sunday Mail, he made excuses for bigots at the same time as he was suggesting that those who were calling for sporting integrity weren’t to be listened to because that’s what motivated us. He decried the signing of Lubo, suggesting we should have gone for John Spencer instead.

This week’s example of his sheer idiocy manifests itself in his on-going campaign against Celtic manager Ronny Deila, who has a big job to do to convince this writer and others of his ability to take our club forward.

The difference is, we’re basing our scepticism on what we can see before our eyes.

Keevins, and others, were determined Ronny would fail from the start, and that bitterness didn’t manifest itself in anything but arrogance and snobbery, the kind that can dismiss an entire country like Lithuania or Ronny’s native Norway.

You don’t have to look far to find evidence that this has little to do with results on the park.

In fact, shortly after his appointment Keevins wrote a quite deranged article saying our club should have ditched the idea of Deila as our manager because of the footage of him doing press ups on the park in his boxer shorts after Strømsgodset had won the league title.

That cannot even remotely be classed as “informed opinion.”

That article was nothing but a character assassination with the ancillary benefit that it took a poke at Celtic as a club.

The campaign against Deila has been relentless.

It reached its nadir this week when he had a go on Clyde and then followed it up on Twitter, calling Deila’s European record into question.

He has a point, because that record isn’t remotely good enough.

But with Keevins you know if it wasn’t that it would be something else.

Just so he could say “told you.”

Just so he could break out into his favourite song; “Celtic in Crisis.”

Then a Tweet asked him to square his treatment of Deila with the free ride he gave McCoist for much of that media’s darling’s disastrous tenure at Rangers and then at Sevco.

Keevins’ answer had Celtic cyberspace united in stunned disbelief.

“My point about RD is his failure to improve in Europe. Nothing to do with McCoist. He wasn’t in Europe.”

McCoist wasn’t in Europe? Really?

As history shows, quite clearly, and as many of us never tire of reminding Sevco fans, their former club died as a direct consequence of Ally McCoist’s notable failures on that very stage.

Were it not for the twin calamities of Malmo and Maribor they might well not have had to enter administration in February 2012, with everything that followed it.

The truth is, Keevins and others gave their mate Ally an appallingly easy time of it, which prolonged the agony for Sevco fans long after the rest of us had graduated from giggling to gales of laughter all the Adam Sandler movies in the world wouldn’t have stopped.

There are honest-to-god journalists working in Scotland, and even in Scottish football.

You can tell who they are because they get on with their day jobs without trying to be more than they are, treating their readers, listeners and viewers with a certain amount of respect.

They are careful in their pronouncements because they know it’s their job to inform the public, and not simply to shovel them bull.

Their not interested in making their names on controversy or cozying up to players, managers, chairmen or PR firms.

My disdain for Keevins goes back a long time, and he’s never convinced me that he’s more than a tabloid hack who often indulges his personal bitterness and spite, and lets that permeate his work.

This is unforgivable in any journalist – his mate Traynor was a disgraceful example of it too – but especially in someone who holds open contempt for the views of those who bought his paper or who listen to the radio show on which he still works.

Keevins is one of the reasons so many of us view that show with derision.

It could have been a crusading platform, doing real journalism and discussing the issues.

Instead, Keevins and others have turned it into a freak show instead.

When the panel on that show decries the attitudes of their audience they might want to consider that those attitudes are a direct consequence of a media that stopped caring years ago and went for the cheap laugh and the one day story.

They stopped doing journalism.

They treated us like mugs, turning the whole thing into a circus.

In promoting the views of hacks like Keevins they made damned sure Clyde became a forum only for slagging matches and one-upsmanship.

I don’t mind that if it’s marketed as entertainment.

But they dare not call it journalism.

That they market it as such is why I listen once in a blue moon and never for very long.

Cause it ain’t that.

“It’s all about opinions,” is the constant refrain on Clyde.

Surely no statement in the English language can be more intellectually lazy – or as fundamentally dishonest – as that one is.

Primary school children have opinions too, after all.

Try debating one of them on the finer points of Keynesian economics or particle physics.

All that particular excuse does is allows ignorance to flourish and people like Keevins to keep their jobs.

Because if he was being judged on any other criteria he’d have been washing dishes for a living years ago.