Alan Judge, the former Brentford player, who Mark Warburton managed at the club, has become the latest person to find out that the narrow-minded Ibrox Twitterati simply can’t handle hearing any criticism or negative comment at all.
Judge has had to issue an apology and a “clarification” after telling a journalist that he would love to play for Warburton again but would never contemplate doing so at Sevco.
Speaking at a press conference in advance of the Republic of Ireland’s coming friendlies with Switzerland and Slovakia, he was, somewhat bizarrely, asked to comment on Sevco and Warburton’s time there. Then he was asked if he’d sign for the Ibrox club.
Quite why any of these questions came up during a Q&A about international football, involving a country who’s fans could care less about Ibrox, to a player who’s never, to my knowledge, expressed any opinion on the Scottish game, is far more interesting to me than Judge’s comments …
Nevertheless, they have made a bit of a stir.
“I wouldn’t be going … not a chance,” Judge said, probably still trying to work out where such stupid, and irrelevant, questions like those had come from in the first place. “I had that call in the summer and I went ‘Are you kidding me? I’d get killed if I went up there!’ Was I asked? Yeah, of course … but no, not a chance.”
These comments aren’t exactly shocking and why they were deemed worthy of the howling invective that followed I simply do not know.
If John Brown, for example, had said the same thing about not playing for Celtic they would have lapped it up like Pavlov’s slabbering dogs.
Alan Judge is a Republic of Ireland international and a Celtic supporter.
In short, he’s not exactly the kind of guy most of their fans would want in the club’s jersey anyway. One only has to look at some of the vitriol that the likes of Jon Daly had to put up with on their anti-social media to get a flavour of what the “constructive criticism” would look like if he had a couple of bad games.
(And yes, they can moan about that comment all they want, and I’m sure they will. But it’s true, and they know that it’s true and it should make the more sensible of them ashamed.)
This is another shining example of the sheer intolerance of some of these people.
That Judge has apologised is dreadful and, I think, without wishing to cause him further upset, a little bit cowardly.
He ought to have told them to eat it.
Another guy who’s crime is simply to have told the truth.
But the Peepil can’t handle the truth.