Yesterday, as tributes poured in from all over the world to a true great, a football man who transcended the game and was loved and admired everywhere, Jason Cundy, a former player much of the world has never heard of and few will remember when he’s no longer here, was sitting in a soft seat at TalkSport where he thought he’d pontificate on the state of football up here and Celtic in particular.
What came out of his mouth was insulting and magnificently stupid; he may as well have spread the cheeks of his fat arse and let rip a good one.
His comments reeked.
They would have stunk the place out if the smell of them wasn’t one we’ve come to associate with that radio station and some of the people who work there; an overblown sense that English football is something special, sentiments which are anti-Scottish and, in keeping with some of their output, profoundly anti-Celtic.
We ought not to be surprised; this is the station that employs the mind-numbingly clownish Adrian Durham, who this site and Fields have written about already and it was still giving a salary to ex ref and arch bigot Jeff Winter long after some of his more sectarian views had made him persona non grata in the newsrooms everywhere else.
Before I go on, let me be honest about something; I don’t entirely blame the station chiefs for their skewed view of how things are up here.
Or rather, I do but I understand how they got those ideas.
Forget for a moment the incomprehensible posturing over the “best league in the world”; I’ll get to that shortly. Their view of Scottish football is understandable, in a sense, considering the low IQ eejits they’ve spoken to from up here over the years.
There’s Charlie Nicholas, for one, who’s always considered this a backwater and felt he belonged in England. He got his chance, of course, but he proved himself a spectacular waster of talent when he flopped like a dead fish there and spent what should have been his peak years at a very successful Aberdeen team before moving to a Celtic side which was a pale shadow of the one he left in the first place. He failed in England so utterly that he crawled home for what he imagined were easier pickings and couldn’t cut that either. His own contempt for Scottish football, expressed enough times over the years, is a form of self loathing; I can’t hate him for that, but will never particularly like him either.
Then there’s Craig Burley, who’s own disdain for Scottish football is legendry and helped wreck his media career up here. He pops up on TalkSport at sporadic intervals and always fascinates, not one word of sense or intelligence ever escaping his lips. Burley is not ignorant or self-hating as much as he’s just stone stupid, as anyone who ever read one of his columns knows well. He’s a guy who is lucky he could kick a ball because he sure as Hell didn’t have a future in brain surgery.
But I first realised how badly out of whack their view of the reality up here was back in 2012, when I heard one of the anchors on the station refer to Keith Jackson as “our expert on Scottish football and this Rangers issue” before doing an interview where our favourite hack made about as many errors in fact and logic as I’ve ever heard whilst pushing the Victim Myth like a hard drug; the whole game up here had gone out of its mind, was vindictively battering Rangers and was heading for disaster and richly deserved to suffer the consequences of it in full.
The overall impression he left the anchor with that day was that of a country of cranks, loons and spiteful sods who had, for bigoted reasons, brought down one of its top clubs. On the same show he extolled the virtues of the gallery of goons and self-promoters who were scrabbling around the carcass of Rangers, and actually predicted that US trucking magnate Bill Millar would complete his purchase of the assets “over the next few days.”
Within hours, and to my eternal amusement, Millar’s consortium had run for the hills after getting “a look under the hood.”
They knew a dodgy engine when they saw one.
I have little doubt Jackson’s own clear-cut ignorance contributed to the impression of the game up here as something of a joke, but he’s just one part of the clown parade which has traipsed through the studios talking down the game here over the years.
It hardly needs saying that the standard of some of the teams up here is piss-poor. Part of the problem here is perception, and I blame the media for that above all else, because they are the key drivers of the hype machine which amplified Sevco’s status far above what the club had been able to earn.
This was the team that was supposed to shake up Celtic’s dominance … and when it turned out that they were every bit as dreadful and filled with third rate players as some of us had said from the start, well of course that was going to reflect badly on the game.
If Scottish football looks like a mess from the outside it’s because the club the media pushes and promotes over and over again above all the others is a mess. More than that; it’s a basket case, a shambles, lurching from disaster to disaster.
It’s no wonder some of the folk in England think the whole game here is just like that.
Yet that lets them off the hook and I’m not about to give them the benefit of the doubt.
What pours out of that studio sometimes isn’t ignorance; it’s bile.
Yesterday this joker Cundy went out of his way to turn the rant into a very directed one, at Celtic. He offered a typical Anglo centric assessment of how we would do in the EPL, and said we would be mid-table if we weren’t battling relegation, and that we’d be “lucky to beat Stoke.”
You know, I have all the respect in the world for my fellow football fans at other clubs.
Unlike Cundy, Durham and his cohort I don’t feel I have any right to insult them or their sides, even when all I’d be doing is pointing out a few home truths. Today’s one of those days when my own natural restraint has been tested beyond endurance.
I may upset and offend some people here, but you know what?
That’s just too damned bad.
The man this Family mourned yesterday scored two goals in separate European Cup Finals for our club.
I’m curious, but how many players at Stoke have managed that incredible feat?
Why, none of course.
Because Stoke is not a major club.
Stoke has never played in a European final, far less two.
Stoke, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, are notable for being the second oldest club in world football, and that would merit them a mention in an overarching history of the game but that is all it would be. A mention.
They haven’t done anything to merit much more and neither have three quarters of the sides they share their league with.
A handful, at the very top, consider themselves giants but have no more claim to that billing than Stoke.
To actually be one of those requires more than just money and that’s all some of them have got.
The modern incarnations of Chelsea and Manchester City are artificial constructs, backed by sugar-daddy wealth and bloated all to Hell and gone. Arsenal have a claim to historical greatness and so do Spurs whilst Manchester United and Liverpool are undisputed giants. Anything beyond and we’re talking about provincial clubs which raised themselves above their surroundings and circumstances for a brief period and never got it back; Notts Forest, Aston Villa, Everton and, you could argue, Leeds, who’s pursuit of modern day success was built on unsustainable spending with all the attendant consequences their fans are still living with today.
English football is over-rated, hyped far beyond merit.
Clubs down there have obscene wealth, yet even with that they seem clueless as to how to grow or build.
The national team provides us with no end of hilarity as their pretensions as a major footballing nation crash again and again and again.
Their club sides, for all that wealth and pomp, usually find themselves dismantled when they come up against the real cream of European football, such as Belgium’s Gent, who knocked Spurs out of the Europa League last week.
Manchester City faced us twice in this year’s Champions League. How’d those games go again? They are not the only examples where we held our own against the cream of the EPL.
Joey Barton, the darling of the TalkSport studio, harboured similar arrogant attitudes about the “standard” up here.
How’d he get on in the games?
Most of the clubs in the EPL have no global reach.
No worldwide fan base.
If their games weren’t shown all over the world they would be unknowns. For all the wealth the likes of Bournemouth, Southampton, West Brom and others can throw around they will never be more than mid-table teams or relegation battlers. Most will never see major honours.
Does Durham or Cundy think we’d swap our history for theirs?
That we value excessive greed over tradition and community and our deep roots?
That we would rather we were able to sign mercenary footballers on grossly inflated salaries over celebrating the life of a true giant like Tommy Gemmell?
Will any of these clubs ever produce a Gemmell, far less see one on the biggest stage of all?
I do have respect for those other clubs and of the histories of which their fans are proud, but Cundy and others ought never to make the mistake of confusing wealth with status. They are not giant clubs and Celtic is. Where Cundy’s idiotic argument really falls on its backside is that he knows full well – because no-one can be as stupid as he appears to be – that if we did have access to that league and its hype machine we wouldn’t be a big club, we’d be a colossal one, dwarfing almost every other in size and reputation. If were able to spend the ludicrous sums they do then we’d be one of the few clubs down there with the weight and global standing to attract a Messi.
He’s kidding himself if he denies that.
We’re not a Stoke or a Swansea or a West Brom; we are Celtic, limited only by the environment in which we find ourselves, but no less sure of who and what we are because of that.
I am sick to death writing about these cretinous goons and their overblown egos based on nothing more than that they get to cover an overblown league. They are as second rate as many of the hugely expensive players their club teams routinely squander their riches on.
This article was amended to correct a misconception about the Aberdeen team Nicholas moved to. They were, of course, a hugely successful, and very good, team in an era where we were nowhere, finishing outside the European spots regularly. Thanks to John Bleasdale for pointing that out.