When I write a headline like that I am usually writing it about a tabloid. I don’t expect to write it about a broadsheet, but today’s article in the Herald, by Graeme McPherson, is so slanted, biased, full of such sheer nonsense that I had no option. It’s an article that can’t be allowed to stand unchallenged. It is a disgrace.
Let me open with the obvious point; he has repeated Stewart Gilmour’s idiotic assertions of earlier in the week, that Peter Lawwell single handedly runs Scottish football. That our CEO, and through him our club, wields more influence than it should.
Forget the fact the article is coached around the idea that Lawwell is the best man for this job; the suggestion itself is garbage.
Peter Lawwell does not run Scottish football. Celtic does not run Scottish football.
If only they did, the game might not get itself in such a state.
“The accusation” which Gilmour made, according to McPherson, “was not a particularly new or surprising one.”
He’s right. You can find that suggestion on any number of websites and blogs, most of them in the gutters of the Ibrox alt-right.
“It hardly falls into the category of breaking news,” he closes out the first paragraph.
He’s right again.
It falls into the category media observers call “fake news.”
To put it another way, it’s a lie.
He acknowledges the origins of this idea when he points out that it “doesn’t come from rival supporters” but from someone who “rubbed shoulders” with Lawwell around the boardroom table. If that’s true I hope Lawwell took his suit to a cleaners right away, lest he be tainted by the paranoia and failure that wafts off the ex St Mirren chairman at the moment.
McPherson offers one example of Lawwell’s “persuasive powers”; the time Gilmour “had his arm twisted and allowed Celtic to rebrand the St Mirren club shop in green and white for a series of summer friendlies.”
Had his arm twisted?
What, like Lawwell employed heavies or something?
Like St Mirren was forced to acquiesce to a demand?
Like extortion?
Well it’s a funny kind of extortion.
Perhaps our ease in getting the agreement had something to do with the £200,000 St Mirren received for that minor and temporary change, which also involved us playing a handful of games at the ground. In short, that move benefited the Paisley club at a time when they’d just been relegated – thanks to Gilmour’s “leadership” – and they were skint.
McPherson’s allegation, or perhaps just his pure bloody pig ignorance, coached in that language, is absolutely appalling.
He owes our club an apology.
But he wasn’t done yet. In fact, that was the opening salvo.
His article continues to paint our CEO in the language of a mob novel.
“Gilmour would never have criticised Lawwell on the record while in office for fear of retribution …” he writes next. What kind of “retribution” was this? That Peter might not turn up for after-match drinks one day? Or that he might show up, wielding a baseball bat and take it to the china?
McPherson goes on to say that Gilmour only went on the radio once he was “freed from the shackles of oppression.”
You would be forgiven for thinking, at this point, that you were reading the Cliff Notes for The Really Shit Plays Of A Bad Shakespeare Impersonator.
He goes on to say that we have “benefited more than most from Rangers’ fall from grace” than other clubs; exactly how? The clubs who have benefited most are those who otherwise might have been done out of European income by the serial cheats.
And this “fall from grace” … doesn’t he mean disgrace?
That “fall” was manufactured inside Ibrox itself. It was nobody’s fault but their own, a fact McPherson would sooner not acknowledge.
Apparently we now have “almost unfettered access to the Champions League” … a blatant attempt to play down our achievements in getting there this year. Because it’s only “unfettered” if one excludes the six games we had to play in qualifiers to get there.
This part is the worst; “They also enjoy the financial largesse of Dermot Desmond, the club’s major shareholder, who has helped bring manager Brendan Rodgers and a number of well-remunerated players to Celtic this season …”
Eah? What?
If I were to write the words I shouted aloud when I read that paragraph I would not have got past the filters on Newsnow and elsewhere.
Because that is purely and simply bollocks of the worst kind.
It’s a lie. Not an exaggeration or the use of inflammatory and inappropriate language, it is a lie.
No other word will suffice.
Every Celtic fan is well aware that we have a majority shareholder of more than adequate means.
He is a genuine bona-fide billionaire, not the Scottish media promoted sort but one of verifiable status and standing.
But he has never bankrolled the club.
He never will.
We do not “enjoy the financial largesse” of Dermott Desmond.
If we did, we’d be on the way to twenty in a row right now, and the Ibrox operation would be on its fourth or fifth club already.
Our club is well-run, on a sustainable basis. We do not have, and we do not want, a sugar daddy. Dermott Desmond might have the influence to get his way, but he’s never exercised his power through his cheque book and he does not have to.
I know this is difficult for our thick-as-shit journalistic class to comprehend, but everything that Celtic has built has been gotten legitimately, by sacrifices, by careful nurturing.
Football is supposed to run like this.
The aberration which was Rangers and the financial basket case which is Sevco are not the way things are meant to be.
McPherson and his ilk are terrified to face up to that because it means that we could easily maintain these standards, as they are built on solid foundations. We are not going to fall into sudden ruin as their favourite club did.
“He will always do what is in Celtic’s best interests in the first instance …” is McPherson’s next line of attack, and his way of suggesting that Lawwell’s positions of responsibility at the SFA and the SPFL are being used in a manner which directly benefits us, to the detriment of the game as a whole.
He can use flowery language to damn Lawwell with faint praise in the rest of the piece as he likes, but that statement reveals his feelings as clearly as any could.
His final paragraphs include a familiar expression of regret; that Sevco are not represented at the top tables as some think they should be.
Nothing could be unhealthier for our sport than to have their directors involved in running our game.
The “lack of leadership” at Ibrox is something that, again, is their own problem.
I am glad that John “We are the Peepul” Gilligan does not have the charisma to put himself up for office and that King is too busy in South Africa to taint the governing bodies with his stench of criminality and that Robertson was rebuffed by the SPL because of the foaming at the mouth statements his club had released prior to the vote.
It’s my considered opinion that as long as such people run that club, pandering to the most extreme element of its support, that they be should be excluded from such positions indefinitely.
I am always dismayed when I read such ignorant articles in the mainstream press, but because this one is not in a down market tabloid I feel a different emotion than normal, because the people who write for that paper cannot be as dumb as those whose cut and paste tendencies have decimated the reputations of the titles they work at.
No, this was a calculated, carefully worded character assassination on Lawwell – disguised, but not too cunningly, as praise – and a direct assault against the integrity of our club.
Its distortion of and ignoring of facts, its inflammatory language and crude appeals to the conspiracy nuts went beyond the standard fare you get in The Daily Record.
For all its sophistication this was a hardcore hatchet job.
Both the paper, and the writer, deserve to be called out for that.