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?
Before The Article Even Properly Starts, There Is A Segue Into … Golf?
The article is entitled “Would Celtic fans forego European adventures for ten in a row? I say yes they would.”
That alone should tell you that you are in the House of Fun. The piece starts out from a lazy premise, a straw man question, and deteriorates from there.
How bad it gets can be surmised by the following; he spends three of the first five paragraphs trying to make a laboured comparison between Celtic’s quests in Europe and a golfer.
I am not joking.
No wonder his newspaper is losing readers.
Readers don’t want to wade through such a strained and pitiful analogy just to get the point – that Celtic consider success in Europe as making the Groups and perhaps a little further. He could have made that stick the way I just did, with one line.
Incredibly, he actually sort of gets it across in the first of them.
“In Champions League terms, Scotland’s best team and biggest club at this moment in time, is akin to the professional tour golfer who stands on the first tee of The Open knowing that just making the cut and finishing within 15 shots of the winner is going to be his biggest pay day of the year.”
Why then does he feel the need to bore the Hell out of the reader with another two paragraphs about travelling the world and making a decent living just under the level of the real contenders? Does he think we still need hand-holding?
I have lamented the death of the serious writer on the Scottish sports pages.
Cameron was going for something else here; the death of the reader.
From boredom.
Celtic Did Not Succeed At Home And Abroad “Whilst Selling Their Best Players.”
“Celtic had to be in Europe. They also had to win at home. They did both while selling their best players.”
Excuse me? I must have missed that.
In Brendan Rodgers’ tenure we sold two players of note in three years.
One was Armstrong who was coming up to the final year of his deal and had intimated his desire to leave.
The choice was to retain him until his contract expired and get nothing for him or to sell him when a suitable offer was made.
This wasn’t Celtic desperately pushing him out the door, it was a sensible act that any reasonable club would have taken.
Many think we should have done the same with Dedryck Boyata. Failure to do so cost us £9 million.
The other player was Moussa Dembele, and as with Armstrong Celtic had offered Dembele a new contract to keep him at the club for at least one more year.
We had no interest in, or intention of, selling Dembele in the window where we did until he made retaining his services impossible.
Cameron’s assertion that we sold our best players whilst winning trophies bears not the slightest relationship to the truth.
In fact, not only did we retain almost the whole of the first team squad but we extended the contracts of many of the best footballer in it, which is why we hold all the cards right now in negotiations with clubs like Arsenal over Kieran Tierney.
Cameron is, as ever, talking crap.
His Article Quickly Spirals Into “What If …” Fantasy Land Delirium.
“Let’s play devil’s advocate. Celtic reach the Champions League this season (and next) which is of couse where players want to be, and certainly the directors, but the extra games, unavoidable injuries, key players missing out, means that nine and ten in a row don’t happen.”
This is the crux of the piece, a “what if?” scenario so discredited that his editor should have told him to go off and write something real.
Celtic has made the Group Stages of one of the European competitions in every single one of the eight in a row campaigns.
Every single one of them.
It has never made the slightest difference to our title prospects.
Furthermore, on top of playing more qualifying matches than ever before we progressed to the knockout stages in the last two seasons, which is two more games on top of the schedule again … and don’t forget that said schedule took us to Hampden more times than the Queens Park bus.
No club in the history of Scottish football has ever won so much playing so many matches as we have in the last three years.
That is a fact.
On top of that, the injury crisis he hypothesises has happened in the last two seasons.
Somehow we were able to survive both.
The scenario he’s playing with here is based on nothing but wishful thinking.
His Analysis Of The Domestic Scene Is Even More Ridiculous Than That …
“Lennon’s squad will this season, in theory, take on a stronger Rangers, Aberdeen and Hibernian, while Hearts and Kilmarnock are more difficult to gauge, which with more games – and that means more problems – and that would see Celtic drop points, giving any of the teams mentioned a chance to mount a challenge – which Rangers did for a period last season.”
I swear to God, I have published that garbled mess exactly as it appears in the article.
Read it again. Then again. Once more, just for the giggles.
Was he sober when he wrote that?
Was whoever proofed it sober when they did?
Does nobody at The Herald Group edit this guys work?
Because that is shambolic. That should never have gotten through a proper process from page to publication. Cameron looks bad enough for having written that, but God knows how the serious professionals at that paper feel with it being out there in the world.
A sense of shame would be my guess.
So let’s try and sort through that tangled mass of jibberish for some meaning.
First, what “more games” is he talking about?
If Celtic gets to both domestic cup finals this season, and if we get to a European group stage, and if we get to the next round in Europe after that we will have played exactly the same number of games as this season. Exactly the same number.
Eight qualifying ties, six group stage games, two knockout round matches. Plus cup games. Plus league encounters.
The so-called “stronger Rangers, Aberdeen and Hibernian” … where’s he getting that from?
The Ibrox club has signed seven players, most of them free transfers. Are they materially better than they were last season? They have more players, yes, but has the squad been enhanced to where you could honestly say they are stronger?
Aberdeen has signed nine players, seven of them on frees, one on loan and one where they’ve paid a modest compensation fee. One of their signings was at the club last season and did nothing of note. Another is Craig Bryson, who’s a decent footballer, but getting on. They have lost Mark Reynolds, Gary Mackay Steven and their captain Graeme Shinnie. Are they necessarily stronger for the footballers they’ve brought in? It very much remains to be seen.
And Hibs? They spent £250,000 on a player from Forest Green Rovers and signed five on frees including Scott Allan.
Only Kilmarnock have had a genuinely interesting summer … they’ve lost their strongest asset, but they have shown ambition and imagination in replacing Steve Clark. We’ll see how they look when the campaign kicks off.
Are any of those teams going to be significantly better than in the last campaign? I doubt it. There is certainly no evidence which suggests it. There has been no game-changing signing at any of those clubs, or at any club outwith Celtic Park.
Much of Cameron – and others – hopes rested on Celtic standing still.
And the signs aren’t good on that one either.
“And Lennon will probably be without Kieran Tierney who is Celtic’s best player.”
Who spent much of last season injured, and who, at present, doesn’t look as if he’s going anywhere.
Even if he does, we have signed a very decent backup and have another couple on the radar.
Cameron Then Demonstrates His Total, Utter, Ignorance Of The Celtic Support …
“Would the supporters accept a mediocre return in Europe, or even downright failure to get through the qualifiers, if it means as little risk as possible would be taken to ensure history is made? My guess is they would.”
My guess is, Cameron doesn’t know a single Celtic fan, and those he does know are probably laughing their backsides off at having steered him towards this absolutely ludicrous conclusion.
Celtic fans want to be in Europe.
We expect to be in Europe.
Europe is where our club tests itself most, where its players get the best experience, it’s one of the club’s selling points to potential signings and, of course, it is the source of a lot of the money that keeps us the biggest club in the land.
What Cameron hasn’t grasped yet is that Celtic fans have it good, and we see no reason why we cannot continue to have it good, and why, in fact, we cannot simply have it all.
As I said in one of the earlier segments, for every year of the eight title wins so far we have had European group stage football on top of winning leagues.
In fact, we have not been without European Group Stage football since 2010.
Before that, it was Strachan’s first season against Artmedia.
We’ve been without European Group Stage football for a handful of years in the last 20.
Any season now without it would be thought of us a total disaster, not only in the stands but in the Celtic boardroom too.
Nobody would accept that result, and I include Neil Lennon himself.
Cameron Also Demonstrates A Financial Illteracy Which Is Breath Taking …
“It’s not as if they need the money. There is £40m in the bank, the sale of Tierney and Olivier Ntcham could double that tally, which is a thought, season tickets are all sold as are every VIP seat and box according to the club website. Celtic could afford, in every sense of the word, two seasons of European failure if the became ten in a row record holders.”
Once again, I’ve left that exactly as it is published.
It barely needs pointing out that this is so completely bonkers …
Celtic would survive two seasons without any European income, that’s true, but the cutting that would be involved would be merciless. And I’m not sure that the manager would survive that fate, whether he had won the ninth title or not.
Failure to qualify for European group stage football, of any sort, two years in a row, would be close to calamitous for the whole club.
Celtic fans are not complete morons.
Whilst King’s “house of cards” theory is flat out garbage there is not a single Celtic fan who do