Spoiler Alert:
Neil Cameron will never win an SJA British Sports Journalism Award.
He never has before, and the years will not be kind to him in this regard.
There are things you can predict with total certainty and there are things you cannot.
Neil Cameron’s piece in The Herald today opens with a “spoiler alert”, that Celtic will never again win the European Cup.
Well as someone smarter than me – and a lot smarter than Cameron – once said; “Forever is a long time and time has a way of changing things.”
(It was Walt Disney. It seems fitting to quote him in a piece about Mickey Mouse journalism.)
UEFA has changed football. It can change it again.
Television has changed football. It can do it in other ways, ways we do not expect.
TV money has not liberated clubs, it is killing the sport.
Eventually someone will slam on the breaks. They have to.
When a player like Sean Longstaff can be marketed as worth £35 million on the strength of a handful of games for Newcastle then all sanity has been lost and something has to give.
I have taken Neil Cameron articles apart before, but never in the way I’m going to take this one to pieces.
It has earned a fuller examination.
The upshot of this piece – that Celtic fans would accept no European football for two years if it brought us ten in a row – is so inane, sophomoric, so witless that I feel this is the only reasonable response to it.
So I guess I should get started with it then, eah?