The central idea behind this column was that I would cover transfer rumours as they appeared. Today there are a rash of them, and they prove just one thing.
If I was throwing darts at a board with a blindfold on I’d have a reasonable chance of doing better than the media is doing right now when it comes to Celtic transfer rumours.
To put it bluntly, with six days to go they are all over the shop today. This is what happens when hacks who have relied for years on hand-me-down information in the form of PR releases have to go out and sniff out actual stories. You get a shambles.
Let’s start with The Express, which no sane person takes seriously.
According to them we’ve “walked away” from potential deals with Meling and Greg Taylor, the latter because of the price tag.
Is the story true? I don’t think the writer has a clue, but knowing Lawwell you would not put it past him to be playing his usual wee daft games with the board at Rugby Park.
Excuse me for stating the obvious but either Taylor is good enough to develop into a real Tierney replacement or he’s not.
If he is, Celtic should pay Kilmarnock the respect of not pissing about with ridiculous low-ball offers. If he’s not then I wonder why we’re wasting their time or ours in the first place.
It’s as simple as that really.
But to be sitting on £25 million and haggling over a few quid … it would be pathetic and a neat summation of why the so-called “sharp suited man” needs to find himself gainful employment elsewhere.
As I said though, my suspicion is that the writer of the Express piece doesn’t have a clue what’s actually going on, which, in his defence, doesn’t make him unique.
Because The Record says we’re still after Meling but that we’re giving up on Taylor for the same reason as appears in The Express piece. They said that Taylor is our “preferred option” but that we won’t meet the £3 million asking price.
Which makes Lawwell look even more ridiculous, as Meling would probably cost us substantially more than we’ve allegedly offered for Taylor.
Again, you read that and you wonder how we can go from a first choice player to a second choice player and actually have to offer more for him and you quickly come to the understanding that The Record doesn’t have a clue what we’re doing either.
Which brings me to The Sun and their story, which is that we’re waiting on Jordan Ibe – a story that still smells like a dead fish to me – and that our first choice left back, and still very much the target we’re in the running for is … Greg Taylor, with Meling having fallen down the pecking order.
So the third separate variation on the same damned story.
Does one of them have it right?
If Taylor signs then The Sun guys can take a bow, but only because their guess was better than everybody else’s. As they are still persisting with this Ibe story I suspect it proves that they don’t have any clearer and idea of what’s going on that anyone else.
I strongly suspect that the end of this window is going to be almost entirely underwhelming and that Lawwell is going to have serious questions to answer.
But that’s based on past experience, not because I know what’s actually going on behind the scenes … and with that brazen admission and lack of basic knowledge I feel eminently qualified, this morning, for a place on a major Scottish football sports desk.
The Rumour Guy is a Celtic fan and blogger from Glasgow.