Today in The Daily Record Keith Jackson has admitted what everyone in the blogosphere knew during the summer but which he and his paper had flatly denied; that Mark Warburton and Sevco had an almighty falling out in the aftermath of the cup final last year and that he would not have returned to the club but for contract talks that inflated his salary above what he was worth and guaranteed him a couple of “marquee signings.”
Yeah, they were free transfer players but Mark Warburton would not have come back to Ibrox had he not got to see Barton and Kranjcar in the club’s colours.
This was widely reported in the blogs at the time, but the press presented it as nonsense.
It came as no surprise to find out we’d had it right all along.
I can’t speak to other writers, but my own sources on it were impeccible.
I had zero doubt that things were every bit as bad as a lot of us were writing.
Last week, Gary Ralston, Jackson’s own colleague at the papers, wrote in the aftermath of the transfer window that there had been no bids for a single Sevco player during it. This came after Mark Guidi had told the Radio Clyde audience that the stories about interest from Red Bull Leipzig in Barrie McKay were an invention designed to spark an auction for his services and that no-one at Ibrox had ever expected to get near the quoted £6 million for him.
And on Twitter, one petulant idiot hack launched a barrage of utterly fictitious allegations and then squirmed backwards when called on to back them up with evidence.
Truth occasionally creeps from beneath the back pages at our national titles, but more often than not it has to be tweezered out and the hacks think nothing of writing one thing one week and then flatly contradicting it a week or two later.
If they had any shame they wouldn’t do it, but of course they have absolutely none.
But the truth always comes out.
Slowly, perhaps, but it always happens.
If the bloggers don’t find it then some rival hack writes it on a day when their imaginations can’t extend as far as making up European Super League nonsense.
If it’s not outright garbage being written, it’s the constant rewrites of history.
They continue, of course, a never ending roll of them.
Today Jackson is bemoaning the “scattergun signing policy” Warburton enacted during the summer.
Amazing.
Can it be the same one that so impressed him at the time that he said we better watch out because their club was looking strong? If these guys want to offer criticism of somebody’s job performance they ought to start with their own. So many of them blew this, so many of them believed the hype they unleashed after that cup semi … they don’t mention any of that in their nonsensical reports now, do they?
For the record, this blog and others expressed doubts about Warburton before last year’s form slump.
We expressed serious doubts about the quality of his signings, before those this summer.
We said that the cup semi-final was an aberrant result due to the poor morale of the Celtic team and the inept tactical decisions made by our manager.
I wrote a lengthy piece – The Storm Before the Calm – where I said that once Ronny was gone our club would stabilise and be far ahead of them.
The appointment of Brendan confirmed our strong fundamentals.
Listen, this is a Celtic site. We might focus on what goes on elsewhere at times, but I’ve already spelled out the reasons why. The chaos over there affects us. But primarily, this site focusses on Celtic related issues; we are Celtic fans. Yet I like to think that myself and the other writers can maintain our analytical eye when we examine events across the city, in much the same way as we can look at matters inside our own club in a critical way when that’s required.
We don’t write biased pieces, in other words.
We simply say what we see.
If Sevco signed Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo I would be concerned. I would write a highly critical article asking where the money was coming from, and pointing out the insanity of it, but I wouldn’t undersell the potential footballing impact. If they brought in a top manager, of Brendan’s calibre, I would ask who was paying his salary but I wouldn’t attempt to suggest it was a bad move or that it wouldn’t make a difference to them.
Jackson has also continued to chart the current divisions between the Ibrox boardroom and the dressing room; he actually deserves a lot of credit for detailing those. The fans have a right to know about them. His criticism of Warburton – the rewrite over the signing policy aside – is right on for the most part, and he’s also questioned the board.
This is the kind of stuff these guys should stick to. Straight reporting. Facts. Bringing people information. Instead of writing gushing nonsense. The one area I’d disagree with him today is where he says that the players are to blame for being weak and not doing enough for their boss. They aren’t weak, they just aren’t good enough. The manager’s arrogant assumption that they would be is what’s done for him and for the club.
Celtic were outstanding at the weekend … but that didn’t save us from getting a wee bit of stick, and I’m talking about the bloggers rather than the team.
Today, the Record’s sister publication – Glasgow Live – talked about “the silence of the Honest Mistake CSC” following the diabolical penalty decision we got at the weekend … this is a sterling example of fake news. Every Celtic site and Facebook page – every single one of them – acknowledged the glaring nature of that error. This was a dig at us just for the sake of it, the writer simply just made stuff up and stuck it in an article.
Hey, I know it smarts that we got a decision for once but to claim that our fans didn’t acknowledge the contentious nature (which is putting it mildly) of it is a flat out lie. It’s pretty self-evident in the first place that any column that styles itself “Old Firm Facts” isn’t going to contain much truth; let’s face it, even the name of it is a falsehood, but this is ridiculous.
Truth and honesty.
These things always have their day in our sport eventually. The era of the bloggers means that we get to everything in the end; not only do we write what they sometimes won’t but we call them out on this kind of crap but we remember everything.
Every statement and every dumb article.
So we can contrast and compare and call them out when we find stuff.
It’s never hard to do.