John Brown. You gotta love him.
Actually, you don’t. He’s a goon. A moron. A gibbering loony. A guy who snarls where others would whisper. He is a clown. Which is why I am not surprised to read his stupid remarks of the last few days where he’s had a pop at our players for talking about the treble.
He sneers because we’ve “been doing that for five years.”
With the total disrespect for other clubs we’ve come to expect from this halfwit, he has suggested that “Rangers” would have done more than we have, as if everyone would have rolled over for them.
Brown has missed his calling in life, that of the world’s creepiest stand-up comedian.
He has a mind-set that views all other clubs as an irrelevance, except us, the one that haunts his every waking minute. He fails to understand the mentality of our club though; we’ve started every season for the past fifty years talking about a treble.
The last five have not been exceptional circumstances in that regard; he really does thinks our whole club philosophy changed when Rangers weren’t around.
Have we underachieved in fifty years?
There have been spells where we have, yes.
Of course there have. Did we underachieve under Neil and then Ronny? To a certain extent; I think our total trophy haul from their tenures could have been better. But no-one at Celtic Park expected a treble every season, and I would defy this cretin to provide me with some proof to the contrary.
Every club with ambition starts every season thinking they should target a clean sweep. Brown’s own arrogance – that he would “expect” Sevco to win everything if we weren’t around – is that of someone who never even tried to see the world through other people’s eyes, or at least just through sober ones.
For the record, Rangers won three of them in 10 years between 1993 and 2003, the years when Murray was outspending other clubs by a factor of ten to one or more, the Financial Doping years and into the EBT ones. By cheating.
There were a lot of bad years in amongst those for Celtic, but we also won a treble in that period, as well as a couple of doubles.
We are justifiably proud of our three trebles, secured as they were by fair minded men who triumphed whilst following the rules.
Brown’s intervention is typically big-mouthed and lacking in insight.
He talks as if their club is “due” something against us because they’ve already been beaten three times. Do these people have any concept of football as a sport based on merit? Do they know that nobody turns up for a game entitled to anything? What an idiot.
Yet his comments are revealing, and the interview he’s given to the Sevco news channel is even more interesting, and it hints at something I suspected last week.
Graeme Murty told the media that he has been taking “advice” from someone his senior, on how to set up the team and improve their overall performances.
I thought last week, and think now, that for all the speculation about it being Walter Smith that, in fact, it was John Brown himself. I can well understand why that would be getting kept quiet.
In fact, I’ll go one better; I suspect Brown has been in charge of the team for the last few weeks, guiding things through Murty. Now, that means he did, in fact “mastermind” a 6-1 win over a completely shambolic Hamilton in the cup but it also means he dropped points in two huge league games.
If Smith had been doing the advising we’d know.
That would have been leaked to the press in the aftermath of the cup game at the weekend, as proof of his continuing genius.
Brown though … not a name they’d want out there.
Not a good idea.
His lengthy discourse on how they should set up against us at Parkhead gels perfectly with what I thought they’d need to do to combat the threat of us; I am saying that his ideas aren’t exactly revolutionary or imaginative.
A guy like me was way ahead of him weeks ago in thinking about damage limitation and hoping to catch us on the break.
This is basic stuff, and it would take someone far smarter than Brown (The Piltdown Man maybe) to make it sound inspired.
It’s like Walter Smith’s tactics from yesteryear; these people never innovate or try something new. It’s always falling back on tried and tested methods from days gone by. Only then they had the players to make it work.
I hope I’m right. I hope the Smith Approach As Suggested By Brown is how they line up against us.
They will be destroyed. Not beaten, but given a proper going over.
There are reports today that suggest Brother Pedro will not be bringing an expensive backroom team to Glasgow with him. That makes me smile because there’s a certain inevitability about a guy like Brown being shoehorned into his unit as assistant, to make sure he “gets it” and understands “what the club is all about.”
I love it. Because it means the real fun still lies ahead of us.
I’ll do a piece on our own expected line-up later … but mark my words, we’re going up against The Smith Approach at the weekend … and Brown will be its guiding hand.
Sweet, sweet, sweet.