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Desperate Dingwall Was Given A Platform By Sky Today To Talk Nonsense About Celtic’s Finances.

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Well, I just caught Sevconut spokesperson Mark Dingwall on Sky Sports News and he had an interesting take on why we were so difficult to catch last season; apparently we outspent their club by a ratio of ten to one. Yes, indeed. He claimed that Celtic spent £70 million last season, on air, and was not contradicted by the interviewer. Just amazing.

You could say that he misspoke.

He’s got the intellect of a fire ant, so that’s not impossible to imagine.

But you could, equally, make a case that what he was actually doing was trying to mislead people into thinking the gap’s even bigger than it is and that we bought success last season like some club run by a rich sugar daddy.

I suspect some will say he’s talking about our wage bill; even that would be a ludicrous claim. It came to around £52 million last year, which is a huge number but well within our ability to budget. The club’s total running costs were just over the £70 million mark.

Dingwall is a clown, of course, as everyone who’s followed his story over the years is well aware. Those who keep a close watch on him will also know a lot of his fellow supporters will not exactly be shocked to learn that his grasp of numbers isn’t to be relied on, but this is surely taking the mickey. What’s equally bizarre is that Sky Sports News Scotland appears not to know that this guy has been the subject of numerous, serious, allegations down the years.

In fact, since Scottish football sportswriters are in the business of trawling back through ancient history looking for dirt perhaps someone at Sky can explain why they are giving a public forum to a guy whose fanzine was regarded in 2002 as so bigoted and sectarian that it was banned even from the environs of Ibrox itself, at a time when their fans were routinely up to their knees in other people’s blood?

It’s a legitimate question, is it not?

As ugly as any of his appearances on the telly is, viewers should be grateful that he didn’t bother regaling them with any of the conspiracy theory nonsense he’s spent the last week pushing, like a hard drug, on his gullible social media following. Even today, he’s been at it.

Is he obsessed or something?

Dingwall is one of the chief prosecutors of this “conflict of interest” story involving the chairman of the SPFL; others include Keith Jackson and the equally repulsive Derek Johnstone.

But anyone who wants to dig a little deeper into Dingwall’s own background will quickly find there are one or two similar tales about him out there. Whether you think they are true or false rather depends on who’s view you’re listening to, but nothing has ever been proved (or if we’re judging this by his own standard disproved either). Nevertheless, he should be well aware of the dangers of people making allegations based on a selective interpretation of the so-called facts.

I will gladly call him a hypocrite for that.

Not that such a label ever stopped anyone at Ibrox or who is associated with that ground.

Sky should do its own vetting better in future.

Sky shouldn’t let Dingwall’s size fool them; although sectarian attitudes are alive and well in their support, and thriving in fact as I’ll explore later, he represents a very small number of people now. Indeed, many in their ranks positively loathe the guy.

But hey, he got his face on the telly today, as the face of the Sevco support.

To talk absolute tripe.

To assert that we had outspent his club by more than £60 million.

And he was allowed to do this, by a journalist who I can only presume either doesn’t know that he was talking crap or just didn’t care.

Sky Sports Scotland, the standard of your “journalism” is appalling. You should be judged not only on the quality of the output (in this case below lousy) but also by the company you keep. On both counts today, we’d call that “epic fail.”

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