Kris Boyd knows how to generate headlines.
Like any troll, he takes a shot at a subject well above his head, targeting someone on a different planet than he is, in the hope that it will stick.
But not only does his petulant rant in the papers today – “Is Brendan Rodgers immune from criticism?”; has he missed the coverage in his own paper – expose him, once again, as an utter goon, but it forces us to go back and check his own less than sterling record.
Boyd talks about the “big games” his team won in Europe; here’s the rub of it. He played in hardly any of them, and barely managed a goal in the whole time.
In fact, he barely made an appearance. When you look at his career history, aside from domestic league and cup games there is a column which Wikipedia merely calls “Other Games.” It includes the stat that he played 30 of those in his career – for a comparison, Celtic’s players have already played 11 European games in this campaign alone – and scored eight goals.
But dig a little deeper into the stat pool and what do you find?
You find some of Boyd’s are Challenge Cup matches and Scottish Championship Play-off matches. So we’re not even talking about 30 European games and eight goals here; a lot of those games were in Scottish football’s third tier cup competition.
Boyd is a mouthy git with nothing to fall back on but pals in the press.
He would be scraping out ovens if he hadn’t made it as a footballer and even that is a term I think is wasted on him. A complete failure not only in England but in his hilariously brief sojourns abroad, he boasts only a scoring record here which the media loves to remind us is greater than that of the King of Kings.
But there was no European Golden Boot, no Champions League medal, no season at Manchester United or two at Barcelona, no double in another European final … so the comparison is specious if you’re being generous to Boyd, which we aren’t.
Successive Rangers bosses knew his limitations and would drop him for any match that required a higher standard of player. The same applied to Scotland managers as his pitifully small number of caps will attest to. On the big stage, he was a nobody.
Indeed there was not one moment whilst he was scoring all those goals that I would have had him in the Celtic squad far less the first team; when I wrote dismissively of Anthony Stokes some years ago I said he was “Celtic’s Kris Boyd” – a waste of a jersey against other than bog-standard teams; it was the gravest insult I ever heaped on a player at our club.
I couldn’t heap too great an insult on Boyd.
It is actually offensive to me that someone this under-qualified, someone this stupid, thinks he can judge the performances of our manager and our players. As a player he was capable of putting the ball in the net, there’s no denying that, but he was also greedy, selfish, arrogant, braindead and as a journalist all those traits are on even fuller display, especially in Scotland where greedy, selfish, arrogant and braindead appear to be pre-requisites for the job.