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The Proof That Celtic’s Ibrox Win Has Sent The Scottish Media Round The Bend.

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If you had the slightest doubt that our win at Ibrox has driven the media almost mad as they try to salvage good news from the wreckage of that result, look no further than this.

I’m going to demonstrate just how pathetic they are by giving you a run down on the absolutely dire stuff that has been reported since that game was won.

This is quite simply amazing.

These are the lengths that they will go to in order to give that support something to cling onto.

No other media, anywhere, is so sycophantic towards one club.

It really takes your breath away when you look into it.

Bear in mind, these all ran in the last nine days … you could not make this up.

Ryan Kent Signs … And The First Mental Comparisons Start 

As everyone is well aware, Ryan Kent signed for the Ibrox club just prior to the closing of the transfer window. An outpouring of sycophantic guff began immediately, with the player being reinvented as the Second Coming.

One article, in The Herald, was so bad as it tried to paint a picture of Kent as some kind of prodigy that this website took it apart a paragraph at a time.

But the worst of all the articles was in The Record. (Where else?)

In that article, Kyle Lafferty offered up the most disturbing shower scene since Psycho as he told of how he cooed in Kent’s ear as they stood together amidst the steam, and told him he could be as good as Eden Hazard. Yes, the Eden Hazard who plays for Real Madrid.

And The Record lapped that up, of course.

Because why not?

It’s a ludicrous comparison in every way, served up to us in a truly bizarre way, but it’s nothing we’ve not seen before.

Besides, the club spent a fortune on this guy; you can’t have anyone saying he’s not worth it.

All the coverage of Kent has been seriously over the top, but this really did take the prize.

Steven Gerrard And His Holiday Karaoke

I wrote about this one last night.

Steven Gerrard decided not to hang around Ibrox to work with the members of his squad who weren’t away on international duty (almost all of them; there are laughably few internationals in that expensively assembled team over there) and went to Portugal instead.

Whilst there he sang a Snow Patrol song in the pub.

That’s it, folks, that’s the story, that’s all there was to see.

But Sevco fans lapped it up like a vampire bat supping blood from an abattoir floor.

Bear in mind that this is a manager singing a song in a boozer instead of being at his place of work, trying to get his team’s confidence up after a shattering defeat. This has zero impact on his abilities as a manager and is utterly irrelevant to the football itself …

Ibrox fans who worry their manager isn’t up to the job need not be concerned; he can hold a tune.

I bet they feel much better knowing that, right?

Football Scotland’s Mind-Bending “Five Ways Sevco Can Bounce Back” Article

Football Scotland produced one of the “laugh out loud” articles of the week.

Entitled “Five Ways Sevco Can Bounce Back From Celtic Defeat In Style” it was pure Ibrox feel-good stuff with no an iota of realism to bother their fans with.

It opened with Miracle of Ryan Kent, then suggested that Gerrard will “learn lessons,” hilariously suggested that the Ibrox club will feel better now they are no longer favourites, suggested that their new signings will all come good and wrapped up with Celtic no longer being the “unstoppable force” that we were.

The author of this trash was John McFarlane, the guy who was once the Ibrox blogger at The Record.

You know just reading his name that there was not an ounce of objectivity in it …

I did a full article on it, and you can read it here.

Alfredo Morelos Is Better Than Edouard … According To A St Johnstone Defender

Absolutely pathetic this one, and I did a full piece on it earlier in the week.

As I asked in that article, how many players do you reckon they had to phone round to get one to say what they wanted here?

Joe Shaughnessy from St Johnstone was the one who finally obliged them, to say he’s played against both and Morelos edged it.

According to The Record, “the debate rages on” over this matter; almost everyone I know had it settled in their minds long ago. When the question was asked on a Scottish radio phone in the other day every one of the pundits said Edouard is the better player without even pausing for thought.

He has five goals in Glasgow derby games against the Ibrox side.

Morelos has none, and he was red-carded in the last one he started.

His manager didn’t even fancy him for the game, and left him on the bench. Some in the media think that’s why they lost. But he came on with half an hour to go and huffed his way through his time on the park without making any impact on the game whatsoever.

And of course, the contrast is even worse when you consider that French Eddie scored the opener and was instrumental in helping to set up the second.

If not for Jullien’s magnificent performance at the back Edouard would have been a man of the match candidate for sure.

Amazingly, The Record actually put down a poll at the end of their ridiculous piece and asked the readers to choose the best player … at the last look, and with more than 5000 votes in, Edouard was ahead with 75% of the vote.

Even the Ibrox fans, who are surely the only people still reading that rag, know the score.

They might not all want to be Edouard (why not?) but most of them would happily trade in the Colombian whinger for a player of his calibre and class.

Joe Aribo Will Help Sevco Bounce Back … Because He’s A Very Nice Lad.

A bizarre one from today; Joe Aribo has a “quality” that will help the club “bounce back.”

And what is that quality?

Football skill? No.

Leadership? No.

Apparently it’s that he is “laid back in the dressing room” and is, overall, just a very nice boy.

The Record actually went to a former US youth coach for this story, and what they got boiled down to this; “He’s a smashing boy, a real nice kid.”

It makes your head ache, doesn’t it?

This low standard of journalism.

This poor fare.

These attempts to convince Ibrox fans that things will be alright after all. Aribo had a dreadful game at the weekend, this footballer who is supposed to be a cut above … but he’s a good kid so not to worry.

You’d think the Celtic dressing room was full of nasty SOB’s.

Are there no laid back people in it? No good lads?

We’ll have to make do with model professionals and winners instead I suppose.

That Bizarre Moment When Steven Davis Is Compared To Cristiano Ronaldo …

Jaw dropping, right?

Look, let’s not be facetious here and jump all over this right away.

I mean, you can sort of see the point that the articles are making, they are about international caps and experience and a player’s overall importance to a team and … no, sorry, I can’t do it.

Of course we should jump all over this.

I mean it’s ridiculous, it’s raving madness, it’s moon-howling and that’s if we’re being kind.

There were other ways that a player’s contribution could be praised.

Ronaldo is a world class performer who has single-handedly won massive competitions for the teams he has played for, most notably the 2016 Euros where you can’t even imagine Portugal as champions without his immense contribution.

I can almost handle these comparisons – as honking as they are – when, like the Hazard-Kent one the players play in a similar position, but Ronaldo and Davis are not remotely comparable there either. The Juventus player is a forward who can play anywhere along the front with the same deadly efficiency.

Davis is a crap defensive midfielder.

Ronaldo is strutting his stuff at the top end of football. Davis is slumming it at Ibrox, creaking his way through games and puffing like a geriatric on a StairMaster.

I don’t know a single person who saw that headline and didn’t burst out laughing; it’s embarrassing that a national newspaper ran that, especially when the player was so thoroughly outclassed by Brown last Sunday.

That Old “Sevco Sells More Tops Than Celtic” Story Rears Its Head Again ….

This is a beauty.

An online “data company” has collated a “league table of shirt sales” which shows the Ibrox club at the top, with us in second.

This is more pathetic than the “80-minute league table” Gerrard was mumbling about at the start of the season, but the minute this came out the media was in a frenzy over it, with Football Scotland taking the lead from the clickbait Scotsman, who’s intrepid internet barrel scraping team “covered it” in their standard style; nothing of substance at all.

Football Scotland’s “writer” Jules Boyle could hardly contain the enthusiasm.

“Steven Gerrard’s men dropped three points against fierce rivals Celtic at Ibrox on Sunday, though it’s early days in the season still. There’s no such concerns when it comes to interest in their shirts though, as a study has shown that they are in the lead over the Hoops.”

I love this story for so many reasons, not least of which is that the more they sell the more they’re going to have to pay to Sports Direct in fines and costs.

I love this story for the way it offers no drill-down data at all.

I love it for the fact anyone thinks we care.

On top of that, Love The Sales are not, as the articles described them a “data company” at all … they are an online search engine for cheap clobber.

“We partner with over 850 of the biggest retailers worldwide to find the best offers on the web for you,” they say on their website … so I’m not entirely sure why anyone would take their word for it here.

But of course, the press got another one-day story which put Celtic in second place and put the Ibrox club on top.

What a pity that the SPL is the only “league table” that matters.

Sevco Tops The YouTube League Table … For A Month. Except … No … 

The pick of the bunch, the ultimate in aiming low and hitting the mark.

When The Sun published this nonsensical feel-good piece the other day it stunned everyone on Celtic cyberspace.

The Ibrox club had gotten into the Euro elite in terms of their YouTube hits.

And Celtic weren’t even at the races.

Celtic’s social media team must have been crying into their beers … except, no, not so much.

I’ll get to that in a moment, but for now let’s consider the piece.

Written by David Irvine (not that one, but you wouldn’t know it to read this trash), it was one of the worst mainstream articles to appear in a long time.

For openers, the data was only good for one month … this wasn’t a long term trend, but a one off jump, an atrocious basis on which to construct an article. One of the assertions was that this had happened in spite of Celtic’s triumph over the Ibrox club last Sunday.

Yet the data was from August.

The game took place in September.

It might well be the most pathetic article I’ve ever read … and yesterday someone drew my attention to something that really tickled me. Celtic’s YouTube page has 110,000 subscribers … the Ibrox club’s channel has 99,200 … which – yes – if you can do the math (are you reading, Irvine?) makes us Scottish football’s YouTube kingpins, not them.

As if any of us would lose any sleep over it either way.

Serious Journalists Would Never Write This Kind Of Tiresome Nonsense

You know that if we had a real media in this country, and serious titles as they do down south, that you would never have to read the avalanche of this stuff which you do. It is especially bad after a Sevco defeat; bear in mind this is a week’s worth of this, not a month.

Most of these came from The Record, or from its offshoot Football Scotland, but The Scotsman will always feature in a Best of the Worst list these days.

The Herald published the notorious piece on Ryan Kent’s stats.

That’s particularly bad because you can’t just limit this nonsense to the tabloids.

They are not alone in running this sort of dreck.

I understand the demands on newspapers these days, with falling sales figures and the need to move to online sources of income … but really, the quality continues to fall in line without sales figures and nobody stops to wonder if those things aren’t perhaps related.

In addition, as those numbers plummet the tabloids, in particular, retreat towards a “core readership”. And who is that core readership, once the real readers have deserted to find real news? Well, you can’t dumb-down and get away with it unless you’re catering to an audience which meets that intellectual mark.

And in Scotland it’s even more fractured as Celtic cyberspace caters to our fans … and that leaves only the dumbest of the Ibrox fans left.

This is the result.

Awful, isn’t it?

But hilarious at the same time!

Thanks to whoever runs the Twitter handle @StandUpForCeltic … you inspired this one.

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