Picture the scene: A newsroom in Glasgow.
The smell of cheap alcohol wafts in the air.
A grizzled hack walks in and promptly shares his big insight with the room. Everyone falls at silent at once, in awe of this sterling reporter and the story he has pitched to them, one so clear-headed you’d never believe he’d spent the night on White Lightning.
“Neil Lennon. Why he might, if all the planets align right, just might be an option for Celtic.”
Stunning.
Just the sort of piece to boost flagging sales figures and rescue a once proud newspaper from its certain demise.
A profoundly brilliant piece of out-of-the-box thinking, the kind that can only have come from someone with a once-in-a-generation reporters brain.
Because no-one else in Scotland ever thought of this, right?
Oh wait … didn’t all of us think of it?
Even if it was merely discussed once on Facebook and then put aside with other equally dumb options?
Yes, I seem to remember doing that about a month ago.
I think it’s pretty clear that sarcasm abounds here.
Today’s Daily Record article was a stunning piece of intellectual laziness, as if Jackson simply couldn’t be bothered switching his brain on before sitting down to write it. It was very much in-the-box thinking, the sort of thing a junior reporter would once have been fired for trying to file. It’s little more than the product of ten minutes work of a Sunday night in between adverts for some reality TV show.
Do they actually pay him for this kind of guff?
There are reasons for Neil Lennon’s departure from Celtic Park, and some of them are in the public domain and some of them are not, but I’m fairly sure Jackson knows what they are, as the Scottish football world is small and there are few secrets in it.
He knows there’s no will, on either side of this thing, for the return of our former captain.
Neil has affection for Celtic, but has different ideas than a lot of people inside Celtic Park.
They most definitely have affection for him, but very distinct views that nothing he’s done whilst at Bolton will have changed one bit.
Jackson knows these things, so aside from being intellectually lazy his piece today was also fundamentally dishonest.
It’s not even speculation; it’s more like half-cut musing down in the pub, a kind of “what if, in certain circumstances, a plus b equalled c and then we were able to do d and move on from there to e and f.”
In other words; garbage.
If we accept that Jackson has to know the obstacles to this scenario ever coming to pass – and the piece itself makes it clear that he does, and with it comes the first admission that Neil was also the subject of criticism from the fans for his style of play – then what exactly is the purpose of his latest bit of fluff and fantasy?
That’s simple enough, I suppose; it’s a crude, not too subtle, attempt at further destabilising Ronny Deila.
He doesn’t even particularly disguise that objective, folding it into the story with assertions about Aberdeen “proving themselves” because they’ve won three games in a row.
The Celtic board is almost certainly planning to make a change at the top before next season starts.
They have to be.
But the objective will be to move the club forward and Neil Lennon, for all we love him, would be a step backwards.
Jackson knows that too.
Today’s article has no merit whatsoever.
At a time when the inky trade is dying, I am amazed his bosses let this guy draw a salary for writing such crap.