Colin Hendry, dear oh dear.
Where even to start with his nonsense of the last few days, that Celtic’s titles won without a team called Rangers in the league don’t count? We’ve all heard variations on this theme before, but it doesn’t get any less embarrassing.
His version is particularly ludicrous. “Celtic suffered because they didn’t have an Old Firm game to play and irrespective of them achieving what they are going to achieve, it’s not fully achieved because Rangers weren’t there for several years,” he says.
Well I have news for him; they aren’t there now either and they never will be again.
But regardless, I’m afraid to say that our ten-in-a-row, when we get there, will count every bit as much as their nine did, although for a good number of years during it we might as well not have been in the league for all the fight we put up.
Those were truly the dark years, years in which challenging the Ibrox monster under Murray was actually a secondary consideration after our survival.
We went through the footballing equivalent of a near-death experience in those years.
In their second season on the road to their nine, we were fifth.
We were fourth in their six and seven in a row years, having never during that spell finished higher than third.
It wasn’t until Tommy Burns turned everything around that we secured a second spot … and even he wasn’t able to hoist us up and over the line.
That took Wim Jansen’s miracle year.
This site did a series of articles on that era – The Dark Years – and with those pieces fresh in the memory it is incredible to think of how poor we were at that time. Nobody has ever suggested that Rangers’ nine was worthless because of that.
Even if we had wanted to indulge in such pathetic, loser, bitching the world would not pay a blind bit of notice to it.
The history books will record every single one of them, and if Hendry has a problem with that it’s no greater than the one I have with the fact the NewCo claims all those held by the dead club, and especially those which should have been voided by Nimmo Smith.
This kind of cry-baby bubbling is just pitiful, it really is.
Hendry thinks he’s insulting Celtic; in truth, what he’s doing is insulting the rest of Scottish football with this rot. That TalkSport and other outlets down south have given this clownish opinion publicity is not surprising, and nor is the promotion of them in the Scottish press but up here it is scandalous given the connotations of those remarks.
They, like the continued promotion of the “Old Firm” myth, reduce the whole of the game here to two clubs, one of which doesn’t even exist any longer. In order to win a title we have to beat everyone we come up against, not just one side.
I don’t know what game the media up here thinks it is covering but it isn’t the one the rest of us are watching.