Tom English. He just couldn’t help himself.
No sooner had a lone Celtic fan got up at yesterday’s AGM and posed a question about Celtic “subsidising” Sevco by virtue of its contract with Parks of Hamilton coaches, but English was letting his tiny brain operate his fat fingers and tweeting his disdain. This wasn’t a single individual; no, English characterised it as the thoughts of our entire support, describing it as “the burning issue of the day for all Celtic fans.”
I couldn’t put down in words on here what I think of Tom English.
Anything I could say would be too good for him.
Peter Lawwell’s response to that question was to point out that Celtic don’t do things that way, that we are a forward thinking organisation which acts professionally. That we are not small minded, focused on small stuff.
“We are better than that,” he said. And he was right.
Celtic never gets credit for its professionalism and its attitude. Instead we get people raking through bins looking for some scandal to attach to us. Other clubs can get away with anything. The media never digs too deep or looks too closely. We know it.
Their fans, unlike ours, do obsess over minor matters, and the club itself is happy to embrace their worst excesses without the media pointing out how utterly ridiculous they are. When Caixinha banned green boots there was no media scrutiny of it at all, far less the gullible response of their fans to it.
They lapped it up like Pavlov’s slobbering dogs.
They put a sectarian slogan on their dressing room walls. Their fans ate it up like a greedy kid scoffing popcorn in a cinema seat. The media pretended it wasn’t happening or what it meant; that Caixinha was so desperate for affirmation that he was pandering to the lowest common denominator, the dregs of the stands.
Their fans have conjured up conspiracy theories of the most preposterous kind.
With their own club on its knees they have dreamed up a global nexus involving everyone from HMRC to UEFA arrayed against them. This preposterous nonsense is underpinned by a toxic idea we call The Victim Lie; and the media has been central in feeding it for years.
Celtic fans, with the benefit of a club in rude health, and the luxury of not having to watch a boardroom filled with dodgy geezers, presided over by a crook, have looked, instead, at the wider running of the game.
We have alleged, with much evidence and the support of our club, that the SFA has bent rules, subverted its constitution and very purpose and ignored glaring issues … and the media treats us with contempt, as English’s tweet ably demonstrates.
Our club thinks big. It looks beyond petty nonsense. It would never have tolerated a manager who banned a certain colour of boots or who put up on the wall of the away dressing room every incentive a visiting club has to give 100%. We will not change bus companies just because the owners are Sevco directors loaning the club money … and the vast majority of our supporters would be embarrassed by those things if we did.
Our fans think bigger too.
We care about bigger issues.
I don’t expect English to understand that; he hasn’t cared for years.
Not about anything he can’t claim on expenses.