Last night, on CelticTV, Gerry McCulloch called the league table, and the Ibrox club’s 16-point lead “fake news.”
This has, somewhat bizarrely, resulted in an outpouring of laughter and another outbreak of hypocrisy across the city.
Before you even start to look at it, you have to marvel at the scenario here; their own club was playing an important match at the same time as ours. How is it, then, that so many of them are so astonishingly well informed and aware of what our club commentator was talking about?
Tell you what; let’s leave that one for a spell. We’ll get back to it some other time.
For now, let’s just focus on the statement itself, what McCulloch meant by it and why the Ibrox illiterati are such brazen charlatans for attempting to scorn the suggestion.
The 16-point lead is real. It’s a fact, in the same way our league lead at the end of the last campaign was a fact. The Ibrox club had a game in hand. Our lead was rock solid though. Even if they’d won their match the deficit was a double-digit one in our favour.
We can claw nine points of that lead back, cutting it to seven, which is three less than the one the Ibrox side would have faced had the last eight games of our campaign gone ahead, and unlike that scenario we have a full half a season in which to do it.
So as real as those numbers are, McCulloch is entirely correct to scoff at the idea that this is a 16-point lead and therefore insurmountable.
There are a lot of if’s and but’s here; we have to perform well and win if we’re going to cut it, and we’re not exactly on top form at the moment although we are, once again, getting some results. But that lead is a phantom, as he says.
This could easily, readily, be dismissed as just another case of wilful ignorance and stupidity on the part of our rivals, but of course it’s more. This is sounding an awful lot like the argument they want to open up over the likely scenario if the league season ends early.
They were flatly against that last time around and their club was still moaning about it last week … but suddenly it’s something worth talking about and no longer seems as “corrupt” as it did then.
All through that period their entire fan-base was united on the idea that our lead – ten points of which was solid, just as seven points of theirs was – was something to be readily dismissed. There was a lot of talk over that game in hand, and the games we had coming up against them were deployed like weapons of war.
Remember the way they framed it?
Hell, the points were already counted, and our lead was cut to just four points with “everything to play for.”
I’m no hypocrite; I look at the league table and I see an immensely difficult task for us. If we’re going to do it we need to win at Ibrox in a couple of weeks, and it’s as simple as that. But we do, after all, have a half a season in front of us, not a mere handful of games.
And it is rich, to say the least, that the people who deployed the argument that a ten-point gap could be overcome in eight matches, on dire form, are so brazenly dismissive of what McCulloch was actually saying.
When last season was halted, they used every one of the arguments that underpins what McCulloch was trying to say last night in support of their suggestion that our league title was undeserved. As per usual they want their cake and eat it too, and as with every other time they’ve tried to bend fact and logic and precedent into the shape they want they sound stupid.
These Peepul don’t have obsess over odd stuff.
In this past week, they have spent much of it telling us that a semi-pro side in a semi-pro league claiming a professional record somehow lessens the historic, world-beating accomplishment of us winning a Quadruple Treble, as if that made their own failure ever to win a major honour somehow easier to bear and less embarrassing to carry.
Now they are cock-a-hoop over this.
This is the triumph of mediocrity and chickenshit thinking. Remember what I said about that? It’s a military term coined because it’s “small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.” What a great example of that they have just given us, again.
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