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Tyrese Campbell Didn’t Snub “The Old Firm.” He Snubbed Sevco.

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I had to laugh at the headlines involving Tyrese Campbell this morning.

Yesterday, I wrote about how the media were saying he’d snubbed a possible move to Celtic Park in order to hook up with Gerrard and his rag-bag mob at Ibrox.

I refuted the Celtic link, which Lennon himself had played down.

Our club was never seriously interested in the player.

In that piece I said I thought he’d make the decision to stay in England anyway, although the hacks were over the moon and confidently predicting that he’d be a Sevco player. I got a good laugh out of the news this morning that he’d opted for England after all.

My other prediction from yesterday’s piece also came to pass; “Old Firm snubbed” headlines.

Look, there are two possibilities here.

Either Lennon lied and we were in for him or Lennon told the truth and we never were.

If we were interested, we made the player an offer and he turned it down.

At that point, we walked. It is our club’s policy not to pay more for a player than people inside the club think he’s worth and if we had any thoughts of signing him they’d have disappeared when his idea of what he should get wasn’t the same as ours on what we should give.

So in that instance we would have been “overtaken” or beaten to the player at all.

In that scenario we walked away from the table. Everyone knows full well – and this has been true for years now, and it was true even when Rangers were at Ibrox – that in a head-to-head with any other Scottish club we would win, if we wanted the player and were willing to go the extra mile.

Had it come to a showdown there is no doubt in my mind, none whatsoever, that Celtic would have secured his signing over interest from the Ibrox rabble. That’s why the initial headlines were so suspect and why I never believed we had seriously entertained the idea.

The media has been gaga over this story for weeks, but it’s only in the last couple of days that they’ve been able to write their favourite variation on the theme; they did the same with Joe Aribo only for the player himself to say that Celtic had never made him an offer.

I just love our media at times. They have no shame whatsoever.

From the near euphoria yesterday to the furious backtracking of today, the spectacle is hilarious.

But they ought to keep our names out of this one.

We aren’t the ones who’ve been snubbed.

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