Kris Boyd knows how to score goals. He always has. In Scotland.
The guy who pontificates from the pages of The Sun scored a lot of them here, to the point where he deluded himself that it made him a better striker than European Cup and Golden Boot winner Henrik Larsson. It didn’t. Larsson didn’t just do it in Scotland, he did it everywhere including at international level.
Boyd does not know anything about football outside of how to run onto the park and kick the ball.
Listen to his “commentary” on Sky; this is an idiot we’re talking about, a guy who would be working a deadening job somewhere, counting hubcaps, if he hadn’t been born with a modicum of skill out on the pitch.
Giving him a column in a national newspaper, where he could impart his “wisdom” to an audience that, although scraping the bottom of the BNP barrel, still had about 50 IQ points on him is an insult to their collective intelligence (about enough brain power to illuminate somebody’s basement) and to a generation of journalism students who can’t find a gig.
Hey, this is why.
Giving column inches to a guy like this.
You want to look at why print journalism in this country has plateaued? Kris Boyd. Barry Ferguson. Andy Walker and all the other assorted goons who know the sum total of nil about the sport they got their livelihoods in, but who newspaper editors handed pencils to.
“Go off and do your worst.”
Boyd has flapped at the challenge.
Even on his best day he cannot reach the standard of the average blogger at his or her worst.
I have had days when I’ve sat in front of the screen feeling like death warmed up, either due to some murderous hangover from celebrating a high octane Celtic win, or simply suffering from some ailment or other and genuinely not felt up to producing a word. But I always do, because I know that no matter how shoddy or badly put together I’ll always be at least one level above the jokers who write in the Scottish press.
Yesterday Boyd wrote – and the paper published – an article of astonishing bitterness, setting up a straw man to knock it down with the subtlety of a nuclear detonation. He claims that Celtic fans who talk to him are deluding themselves with grand expectations of “competing” in Europe.
The clue is in the idea itself; that any Celtic fan possessed of more than a grain of common sense would discuss our chances of doing anything with Kris Boyd in the first place.
Please. Why would they?
Someone with a budgie to talk to would be guaranteed a more intelligent discussion.
No Celtic fan believes we’ll conquer Europe, but we’re looking forward to the challenge just the same.
The envy and the small-minded spite leaks out of Boyd’s every word.
He brings up Lincoln Red Imps, as if that match defines our campaign. He brings up our defeat in Barcelona as if they aren’t capable of doing that to any team in football on their day. He talks about Monchengladbach without ever once examining the strength of German football.
He mentions Manchester City, briefly, saying we got “good results” in those games.
Aye, we did.
He uses the word like it’s nothing, failing to take into consideration that he and others were positively orgasmic before the Groups started and predicting we wouldn’t gain a single point. Try three of them. Two away from home. Before this team really started to motor.
He attacks Scott Sinclair, for what he failed to do in England.
He talked about how there was no queue of clubs lining up to buy him, the implication being that he couldn’t cut it down there.
But Brendan, who worked with him and got the best years out of him thus far in his career, has forgotten more about the game than Boyd will ever know and his was the only opinion I gave a toss about and it has been vindicated in spades.
Sinclair has swept the boards up here, winning every major award.
That sticks in Boyd’s throat like a lump of coal.
This is part of the problem; he doesn’t even pretend to be impartial.
He can’t hide his bitterness for too long; it oozes out of him like snot from a runny nose. When we won the title after beating Hearts 5-0 not only did he predict that Brendan would leave if a club down south expressed interest, but he then wet his pants dreaming up a glue sniffers scenario where all our top talents would follow him out of the club, the board would refuse to spend any of the money and we would detonate like a battery left on charge too long.
He also thinks Derek McInnes will be manager of Sevco eventually; the lure of the club will be just too hard to resist.
The thought won’t give me too many sleepless nights, I don’t think.
Besides, McInnes turned it down this summer, when it was there for him on a plate. Does Boyd really think that when Caixinha has assembled the next squad of misfits, when the club has blown what little it had to spare, when the the manager has been run out of town on a rail, with the club mired in debt and attendances have fallen off the roof (if the roof is still there) that the club will be a more attractive proposition? Don’t count on it.
Blue tinted bollocks, the lot of it.
His general point was, as has become typical of the hacks, all about the “poor standard of Scottish football”, an argument I destroyed here the other day when I looked at the respective points totals teams got last year, in what we were told was a vastly improving football environment.
And what do you know?
The top four clubs aren’t in a very different state than they were then, with Aberdeen actually improving over the course of this campaign.
The fact is that Celtic have just moved so far of the rest.
That, too, bothers Boyd and others, particularly because their half-assed suggestions about handicapping and what not are non-starters and they know it. They also know that in spite of all the big talk from Ibrox there’ll be no challenge from that quarter any time soon.
Like in the next 50 years.
Boyd thinks the standard of Scottish football has always been higher than now.
Which is a convenient way of saying “it was higher when I was scoring goals in it” and when a club calling itself Rangers was financially doping itself to an early grave.
Even then successive managers didn’t fancy him in the bigger games, against the best teams.
If only there was a journalistic equivalent of leaving an obvious halfwit on the bench, he could stick to writing stories about junior football.
Believe me, it’s more his level.