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After Another Shameful Week, The Scottish Sports Media Again Proves That It’s Not Fit For Purpose.

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Before I get to the main article of the day – and yes it’s on Sevco – let me explain why it’s such an important piece and why I am bothering to write it at all.

It’s because it’s stuff our media won’t write.

I’m writing this one, before that piece, because of the latest atrocity of an article by one of our so-called journalists, one of the most ignorant men in our media, a self-promoting goon who has no need for it. His career has peaked, at a dying newspaper.

He’s a has-been and self-promotion when you’re already past your best is one of those things in life that I just find futile and sad.

I’ve written about this guy a couple of times on this site, because he writes stuff that is so absurd that it almost gives you no choice but to do so. Today, in an article about the game next weekend, he decided, for no reason whatsoever, to segue into an attack on us.

The bloggers. The Bampots.

Maybe he’s still smarting from the last time I gave him a bitch-slapping on here, or from The Clumpany’s wonderful put-down of him after he wrote an article on Patrick Roberts and his “lack of ambition” in returning to Celtic Park that was so bad we all wondered if he had written it during a particularly fevered glue-sniffing weekend.

The truth is, I really don’t care about this guy, which is why I won’t use his name in this piece having already vowed never to mention it again on this site, but as he chose to attack us it’s only fitting that some of us will want to hit back, and there’s no better way to do it than to look at his own words and answer the question he asks in them.

First things first though, he’s still putting his name in the headline.

Big mistake that one, as I’ve pointed out before.

Not only is it arrogant, and stupid, it’s an advertising board that says “click on this link if you want to read what Stone Stupid actually writes like.”

The headline reads “Graeme Murty can silence (Sevco) ‘false dawn’ jibes with victory over Celtic.”

We’ve not even got to the main body of the article before he’s already talking nonsense.

One win – if he gets it – means exactly nothing.

Murty has already had four of them in a row and the press is wetting their pants.

When he goes two months, three months, without losing a game then he might have something. We’re supposed to forget the Hibs win at Ibrox not three weeks ago, a result that follows a trend with this guy and his time in charge so far.

The hack dawdles through his article writing one piece of nonsense after another; I’ll get to some of them presently. But let’s tackle the crucial paragraphs first:

“There are bloggers who expend all their efforts in a pathological state of intensity by pouring over everything to do with Sevco at the expense of writing about their own club. And vice versa. It’s bizarre but much as they’d hate to admit it, some know the sands have started to shift ahead of this Old Firm fixture.”

First up, there’s no “pathological state of intensity” here; that’s in his own wretched imagination.

I do this for a living, not to satisfy some deep seated craving.

My job is to write about football in Scotland and the media which covers it; this is called The CelticBlog because it covers those issues from a Celtic perspective.

But that does not mean a biased one.

And I write about my own club every single day. But the truth is, a well-run club like Celtic only generates so much news. Even when we’re not playing terribly well, we’re top of the table and with a League Cup already bagged and safe in the Scottish Cup semi-finals.

I could spend all day gushing about good we are, but that would get old after a while and it’s been plainly untrue for much of the campaign. I suppose I could also spend every hour writing about how poor we are, but that would give the false impression that we’re mired in some kind of crisis, which, as anyone knows full well, is preposterous.

There are only so many ways that you can write about one game, and if people want to read generic Celtic pieces about who’s in training and who’s not, or stories of all of our yesterday’s then there are a dozen, nearly identical, sites where you can find as many of them as you want.

Some of us write about what’s happening around us, focussing on what the current issues are, and the simple truth is that one club in Scotland generates more stories of that sort than any other, by far … and it’s the one that sees itself as our so-called biggest rival.

This isn’t about doing it “at the expense of our own club.”

Our club loses nothing whatsoever from our attention being focussed on other things. Our club is run well. It is successful. It is powerful and influential and rich. I have written about all of that, and will do again. And from this safe vantage point, of knowing it’s in good hands, we are in a good place from which to survey the footballing landscape in which we play, how it’s governed … and how it’s covered by the press.

And this is the truth of it; if the press was better at its job, if the hack himself and those he shares office space with, had more balls or perhaps just a handful of brain-cells between them, Scottish football wouldn’t need us at all.

Because when it comes right down to it, we cover what they won’t.

We tell the truth which they won’t.

We write with the passion they lack – which they call “pathological intensity” – because we care about the sport, and they don’t give a monkeys except in that it’s their meal-ticket. They leech off it and treat with utter contempt those who pay to watch it.

We can measure that contempt by the way he tries to tell us what’s in our own minds; “as they’d hate to admit it, some know the sands have started to shift ahead of this fixture.”

Bollocks.

Like I said, when Murty’s rag-bag mob goes more than a handful of games without defeat, when he’s actually got a settled team, when he’s in the job for real instead of on this shabby part-time basis … then perhaps, just perhaps, we will have to acknowledge – because it’ll be the truth – that their club is in a better place than it is right now.

“It’s a far cry from back-to-back defeats by Hamilton and Dundee in November that threatened to scupper Murty before he’d got started,” he writes, blithely ignoring that actually they dropped a further eleven points after those games … the last three just a few weeks ago.

And this is typical of the sticking plaster revisionism over all things at Ibrox.

This week saw the utter collapse of the Morelos story, it saw King end up just where we all said he would, it saw the Close Brothers deal exposed in the harshest possible light … and the press and the way they covered all three stories being made to look absolutely ridiculous for swallowing the lies on every front.

Because their revisionism extends beyond just what Sevco does or doesn’t do on the pitch, and that’s a problem for some of us because an Ibrox club was already involved in a decade plus of corruption and scandal and the governing bodies were in on it and anyone who doesn’t think that affected us has been asleep for a long time.

It did and it continues to.

Listen, the media itself has let an entire parade of charlatans and crooks traipse through the Ibrox gates and that’s our business because they’ve run that club like a crime family and there’s no sign of them stopping, and that does impact on our own.

The media has been so far behind the curve here they should be embarrassed, but they’re clearly not otherwise they wouldn’t continue printing what some of them must know are outright lies, and they can try to play the men and not the ball here and with their other snide attacks on us, but as their own influence has waned ours has grown on the back of doing the job they won’t.

Anyone who wants to believe that everything at Ibrox is rosy is fully entitled to do that.

I have no problem with people who believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden; my own objections come when people try to force the rest of us to adapt our lives and our outlook to these non-existent creatures.

The media insults our intelligence, and its lies poison our sport and make it easier for corruption to thrive.

As long as they continue to behave like that, we’ll continue to write about it.

The hack in question today wasn’t really concerned with our scrutiny of Sevco … none of them are.

They are concerned that we shine the spotlight on them.

They are uncomfortable under it. Good.

In a weekend where they hypocritically and shamelessly shone it on Dundee, and lied about the state of that club, whilst a much bigger one and a much bigger story goes unexplored on their own doorstep, they have no right, morally or otherwise, to lecture anybody.

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