Barrie McKay has confirmed what this site and others have been writing about for a few months, and what the Scottish media will not touch with a bargepole although the story is out there, just begging to be written. I guess they’re too busy.
500 word pieces on why Celtic’s banners are the most evil the world has seen since the emblems of the Third Reich must be taxing.
Regardless, McKay has had his say and forced some of them to confront the truth.
He spoke to the BBC earlier, and this is what he said.
“There was a change of manager and his opinion was different … I wasn’t being treated the way any human being should be treated, but that’s football and I had to move on.”
Now, there are things that happen at a football club which make a parting of the ways inevitable. There are clashes of personality. There are arguments over tactics and stuff like that. These things take place everywhere. Ronny’s ideas didn’t go over terribly well with a lot of the Celtic players, and some of them remained resistant to that right to the end.
But there’s a way, a good way, a proper way, of dealing with that sort of stuff.
Read again what McKay said.
“I wasn’t being treated the way any human being should be treated.”
That goes far beyond a player being subjected to disciplinary action or given the news that he’s no longer going to play for the team. There’s no dignity, no class, no compassion, no decency, in what McKay is talking about, and you’ll note that he wasn’t asked to elaborate.
Perhaps the media doesn’t feel that information is important.
But other players, some still at Ibrox, know exactly what he’s talking about.
This is life under Pedro. Not a boot camp as much as a slog across frozen fields to dig up root vegetables in a Russian gulag. Life over there is not pleasant. It is decidedly ugly, decidedly harsh, and it is clearly heading for an ugly ending.
McKay is the first to speak out. He will not be the last.