All I need to say here is Gordon Waddell (yeah, I know) and Michael Gannon (uhuh, the very same) and you guys know where I’m going with this. Not for nothing do I call The Sunday Mail and The Daily Record “Scotland’s favourite brand of decorative bog roll.” An organisation that employs these two, and a Sevco blogger, and Keith Jackson will never really be known for doing anything substantial but these two take the piss even there.
Let’s start with Waddell, who’s article on Kieran Tierney tries to skate between his claims that he’d be happy for the player to stay in Scotland and his clear-cut desire to see him punted as soon as is humanly possible. This isn’t exactly a shock.
Here’s what I want to know; did Alan Brazil nick his story from Gordon Waddell, or Gordon Waddell nick his from Alan Brazil? Because both have dropped almost identical garbage today on how Kieran and Celtic would be tested by a big offer for the player. Honestly, go and look at those two pieces on Newsnow; they are almost word for word.
This offer they keep talking about, the one that will test our resolve, it remains absolutely hypothetical by the way, much like Sevco’s alleged interest in McInnes. Not a single club has publicly tabled a bid and when you consider that nobody in the press has even made up some story about private meetings you know this one is a dead rubber.
This isn’t to say that interest doesn’t exist; it almost certainly does. But until it’s something more than paper talk there’s nothing whatsoever to see. Celtic isn’t stirring this soup; we’ve given the kid a long term deal which is close to saying “hands off” as you’ll get.
But Waddell doesn’t believe that, or he says he doesn’t. He seems to think that even if Kieran is sincere about wanting to spend his career at Celtic Park that the choice will be taken out of his hands, that he’ll be gagged and bound and slammed in a car boot and driven south if that’s what it takes. (Waddell actually writes something very like that; Peter Lawwell – kidnapper. What a joke that man is, what a joke the paper is for publishing it.)
As “proof” of this he offers up the example of Alan Hutton, who’s devotion to Rangers was such that he had to be virtually kicked out the door. Uhuh. We’re talking about the same guy here, right? The one who was content to spend months of his career, at a time, sitting on the bench on loan at various clubs because he refused to go somewhere on a permanent deal where it meant taking a pay cut? The guy who’s first purchase on arriving in London was a Bentley?
Same one? Yeah?
Yes he turned down two offers before the right one came along, but neither he nor the club was as reluctant to do the deal as the press has always evidently believed; I happen to know (don’t ask me how, a gentleman never tells) that the personal terms Spurs offered him in the first place were, initially, lower than those he was on at Ibrox but with a promise of hefty increases and bonuses he wasn’t remotely interested in. The second offer gave him wage parity with his Ibrox deal and the same promised incentives. Credit to the kid, he wanted the big bucks right away and he aimed high and he got exactly what he was after.
Waddell may or may not know that, but I suspect he doesn’t care either way. The upshot of his story is that Celtic would sell Kieran whether Kieran wanted to go or not … but that rather upends that fine football truism that Waddell appears not to understand; no club would sell its best player, especially not one of that calibre, if they could avoid it.
And Celtic have no need to sell … because we’re a well run club on solid ground. I know this breaks their hearts whenever its raised, but it happens to be true … unlike the situation facing a club across the city. Which brings me to Michael Gannon.
He wins the prize for today’s most spectacular piece of outright bollocks.
His article today, on Sevco’s accounts, is a piece of pure fluff. It contains absolutely no analysis whatsoever, far less than which is necessary to make the utterly spurious comment that the losses were “not bad or good but somewhere in between” which is the thrust of the whole article.
You know, I might not fancy Michael Gannon as a journalist, but I will go to bed every night thankful that he’s not doing my tax return because when a company’s losses double in a year, when they are relying on loans to survive week to week, when their chairman – who’s promising to underwrite the losses haha and alternates between that and telling the world how skint he is – faces imminent court sanctions … that doesn’t fall on the “good-bad” spectrum at all. It falls somewhere on the “bad – utter meltdown and collapse of the company” one.
What is it with these gutless wonders and their constant failure to tell it like it is? If they wrote that Sevco was a financial basket case run by a crook that wouldn’t be stretching it, it would be stating the facts as almost everyone understands them to be. This wouldn’t be breaching some confidence, the leaking of new and shattering information … it would be doing the job, which is to inform people of what’s actually going on.
He talks about what Celtic made in merchandising – £7 million in profit from that – and he says that if Sevco can get even half of that they will make twice what they were getting before … a complicated way of saying they’ll still only make half what we did.
And £3 million? That’s going to do a lot of good, isn’t it? That’s going to bridge the gap between the clubs …
He calls their figures “the hangover from the great Summer Recruitment Drive of 2016” as if he and his fellow hacks weren’t cheerleading every signing Warburton made, as if that spending spree wasn’t sanctioned at the very top of the club, as if it’s all down to their former boss. He also laments this summer’s splurge, which again he and others cheered all the way, never once asking (and guess what? We were asking) how it could be afforded.
“By the end of next season King and the Three Bears will have sunk in £22m in loans and that will eventually be turned in to equity after a much-needed share issue,” he writes, with no apparent understanding of just how that will work, or any insight into why the club’s directors should agree to turn those debts into worthless scraps of paper.
For the love of the club?
Did these people make their money being stupid, or what?
Are any of them the sort of high net-worth individuals who can afford to throw money away?
Does Gannon care?
Well why should he?
He gets paid for producing this toilet paper either way.