Towards the end of last season, I wrote an article for this site on the colossal amount of online abuse Leigh Griffiths was getting, which culminated in people wishing harm on his young kids. Can you think of anything more horrific, more reprehensible, more venomous than that? It makes you wonder what rock these scum crawled out from under.
Everyone knows what I think of Leigh Griffiths, and always have. We’re awfully goddamned lucky to have him. Before the coming season ends he’ll have smashed through the 100 goals mark for Celtic and join the pantheon of heroes who’ve managed it up until now.
He might well be the quickest player in our club’s history to do so; the guys who do deep research will be able to answer that better than me, but joining Celtic’s 100 goals club was his destiny the minute he pulled on the Hoops for the first time. I was following his career for years.
I knew he would play for us, and I knew he’d be a sensation.
I had no fears about his abilities as a player. If there was a doubt at all, a nagging one, it was about his temperament. There were a lot of stories about him over the years, but I always thought they were exaggerated nonsense, filler for crap newspaper columns.
I was right, but he certainly had a little bit of growing up to do. The concern, always, with footballers is that they veer off course. Other very good players have done it; Derek Riordan was one of them, another ex-Hibs boy who had a nearly mystical ability for putting the ball in the net.
Life at Celtic simply crushed that guy. The weight of expectation was way more than he could handle. It was a tragedy, and a cautionary tale.
I needn’t have been concerned, because Leigh has shown astonishing maturity as a Celtic player. Not only has he risen to the challenges presented to him on the park but he has grown into the model professional and role model a club like our requires a player to be off it too. He knows a place in our illustrious history is there for the taking, and he wants that and you can tell that he wants it. He’s already a fan’s favourite in the here and now.
He is one of those players who could easily be one we tell our grandkids we saw at his prime.
Leigh is under about as much pressure as any player in Scotland, and he’s handling it brilliantly. One of the pressures is dealing with the enormous interest there is on him out there in the Twittersphere and on the blogs. It would be easy for him to get dragged into online spats; Neil Lennon, in particular, often fell prey to the temptation to ram insults back at those who made them to him. Indeed, Leigh has proved he can give as good as he gets.
Yet he avoids the uglier stuff.
He’s come off Twitter a few times, and this week he’s done it again, over the abysmal behaviour of others.
They laugh and sneer, and they tweet away to each other about how they’ve forced to abandon his online life … but in point of fact, that shows just how blind and stupid they actually are. Leigh has an online presence, not an online life. He has an actual life away from the internet – unlike some of these goons – and in that life he really is a professional footballer whose job is to score goals.
And you know what? As a couple of brilliant blogs have already pointed out today – and in particular the one from IndyCelts – their abuse only helps him do that better than he ever has. Leigh has taken their insults and abuse and he’s internalised it, unleashing it only out there where it matters, on the football pitch. His every strike is a strike against them. His every goal is his way of enacting revenge and the volume of his goals makes it seem like the Death of A Thousand Cuts to those who’ve started to fear his name the way they once feared that of Henrik.
I hate to see our players getting such abuse, especially when it manifests itself in the disturbing, demented way of the social media Sevco sewer, and I know that when these creatures drag his family into the mire he feels that deeply, but I am comforting by the fact he understands that it’s motivated by the stark terror they feel at having him snatch away little parts of their lives and dreams and that it makes him more determined to do just that.
Slagging Leigh Griffiths online is a little bit like poking a tiger with a stick. I would advise those doing it to think long and hard about that before doing it, but as I know these goons are incapable of rational behaviour I imagine they’ll learn their lesson the hard way.