Oh you’re gonna love this one. I know I did.
First up, pop quiz time; who in God’s name is Dugald McCarrison?
I’ll tell you what I know from the article, which will save you ever having to look for it or read it.
He’s an “ex Celtic midfielder” who’s admitted to stealing £45,000 worth of gear from a firm he works for. The details are unimportant next to the fact that the Record has slapped a picture of him in his Hooped strip under a typically anti-Celtic headline.
Let me clue you in if you’re as confused as I was, and I make no bones about having had to go and look this one up on Wikipedia, so clueless was I about his footballing identity.
McCarrison is, as the headline suggests, an ex-Celtic midfielder. But I say that in the way Martin Freeman is said to be a Celtic fan, in that he’s been photographed wearing one of our world famous scarves. McCarrison was on the books at Celtic Park for six years, between 1987 and 1993.
He played a whole four times.
Indeed, his football “career” was pretty underwhelming; he racked up just under 30 appearances in the entirety of it. He spent at least two years of his career at Parkhead out on loan. He played for Ipswich and Darlington during that time. After Celtic he played at Kilmarnock (where he made twice as many appearances as at Celtic) and then Hamilton (where he played almost three times as many games.) He then moved to Glentoran.
That’s five clubs apart from Celtic. The paper could have chose to highlight his exploits at any one of the others, or none of them at all, for all the impact he made. Yet oddly enough, The Record chose to go with a nice picture of him in a Celtic top.
I’ve seen “made up pish” before, and things spun to put Celtic in a negative light, but this one really does take the mickey. I grew up watching Celtic in that dark period, and let’s face it if you couldn’t get a game then with luminaries such as Wayne Biggins, Justin Whittle and Gary Holt (remember them? We signed them from the army. And I thought our transfer policy has been bad of late … Jesus, it doesn’t bear thinking about) in the team … you must have been really crap.
It seems McCarrison is no better at stealing for a living than he was at kicking a ball about, but this is hardly the point either.
Ex Celtic midfielder?
You’ve got to be joking.
That’s bending the definition until the elastic snaps and hits you in the face.
Much as calling the writer of this flaccid piece of work a “journalist” would be.
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