Yesterday, I asked my brother-in-law to post the great REM song Shiny Happy People on The CelticBlog Facebook page towards the end of the game, which he duly did.
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I knew I was going to write this piece.
I knew what we would see when the game ended.
And there it was.
The most mournful faces in all of Scotland, those of David Tanner and Neil McCann.
Tanner – who was the subject of a piece on here last week – tried to stay professional. He didn’t do it very well, his face was tripping him throughout, and although he did put a presenters veneer on it there was simply no disguising how scunnered he was.
Tanner really doesn’t like us much. I got a perverse pleasure out of watching him trying to grin and bear it yesterday. More than banning people, this is what our club should do. Force all the anti-Celtic hacks to cover the victory party, and suffer in silence.
His discomfort was amusing. McCann’s was just embarrassing.
He looked like a guy who had visited both dressing rooms and sooked all the half-time lemons before going back on the air. He was spewing. Even with Brendan there, and talking football, he couldn’t keep the look off his face. It was that of a man who wishes he were anywhere else in the world. It was if someone had told him his wife was seeing another man and had the videos to prove it, and was making him watch.
Not an inapt metaphor; McCann was the guy who started out as a Celtic fan and morphed into an uber-Rangers supporter. This happens, but rarely in that direction. Once he would have been part of an occasion like that, before he moved to Ibrox, EBT and all. They do say there’s no zealot like a convert, and McCann certainly proves it.
I could go on at length about Sky Sports Scotland; there’s a culture there that is pretty pro-Sevco at the moment. Charles Patterson, commenting from Ibrox at the weekend, sounded like a guy at a funeral when Motherwell scored the opening goal, and they’ve long filled their studio ranks with people who don’t even pretend to be impartial.
But yesterday took the cake. They had John Collins there for “balance” but McCann looked like a guy whose haemorrhoids had started to throb when our former assistant manager said he thought we would go on and win ten in a row.
I enjoyed every single thing about that game yesterday, but seeing the Slimy, Unhappy People afterwards was just wonderful, if not a reminder of just how honking bad Sky’s coverage of our game has become in recent years.
I suppose it could have been worse (or better, in this case); we could have been watching BEIN Sport, where Richard Keys, Andy Gray and McCoist gurned and grunted and tried to pretend not to be equally cheesed off with the result and what it meant.