And there I bet you thought that the Arzani story was only being pushed to cause Celtic a little trouble?
Not quite.
Certainly, focussing on Brendan’s comments from before the kid signed, and then using them to beat him because the player is not in the European squad gives them a brief flurry of headlines with an anti-Celtic slant, but there was another reason for the prominence of these stories and that one isn’t being properly explored.
It’s that a certain player – Lee Wallace – has been left out of the squad Sevco submitting for their own European ties.
And this is easily the bigger story, although it isn’t being covered that way.
Arzani has been in the door for five minutes. He is 19. He is an Australian international but for the last few years he’s been playing in their national league. He is not ready for the European football level, and Brendan knows that and accepts it. His absence does not affect our squad in any meaningful way, nor morale in it.
Wallace is an Ibrox stalwart; this is not a minor story.
At a time when the Ibrox club is signing, and lauding, players who ran out of Ibrox as fast as they could get their sports cars started back in 2012, Wallace is the last of the players who showed loyalty and agreed to TUPE over from the old club.
He can still do a job in their first team, and indeed Gerrard welcomed him back to the team just a few weeks ago.
But he’s also taking the club through a legal process because of the way he and Miller were treated. You cannot help thinking of this is a crude form of punishment beating for that, and Sevco fans are pretty astounded by the decision not to give him a place on the list.
Gerrard has actually said the player still has a future at Ibrox; that clearly isn’t the case. The media should be more animated by this story than they are; instead they are concentrating on Arzani who hasn’t even made a first team appearance for our club.
This is an example of our press focussing on an anti-Celtic story to distract from an even bigger one involving Ibrox. Wallace is being treated with appalling disrespect by the club, and you have to wonder if the manager himself has been yanked around here; his own contention that Wallace was still in his thoughts appears to have been contradicted by this decision.
There’s no way anyone in the MSM will be asking that, though.
They know what side their bread is buttered on and who butters it.
They will focus on fluff instead, on how Arzani has been snubbed and how Man City are said to be furious … except that he hasn’t and they aren’t.
This is the media using us as a punching bag because they don’t want to ask hard questions elsewhere.
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