Doing this job, you read all manner of nonsense, as part of the gig is to monitor the other blogs and, especially, the media.
I wrote earlier about McAvennie and his nonsensical rambling, and I would not even read him unless I had to.
Following the mainstream press is standard stuff, but occasionally you’ll read something in one of their outlets which is so off the wall that it makes the inside of your head itch.
Tonight, The Evening Times has published a piece just like that, and you know that it’s crap before you even get past the headline, which is bad enough.
You know it because nobody put their name on it.
You know it because the premise of the piece is so ridiculous that it can’t be anything else. “Rodgers’ Celtic Invincibles vs Gerrard’s current Rangers crop – who wins?” I mean, right there you know what you need to.
The piece does quote two Times writers, one of whom says Celtic would win and the other who claims that Gerrard’s NewCo would get it.
I don’t even care what the logic of that garbage is, Rodgers’ team would whip the skin off the current Ibrox club all day, every day.
There is no doubt in my mind about that, none at all.
And the question is ludicrous.
What has this Ibrox team done to even be compared in the same breath as the Invincible side?
For one thing, they won’t complete the domestic campaign as Invincible.
You need to actually be unbeaten for that, and they’re not since St Mirren knocked them out of the League Cup.
This Ibrox team hasn’t even won the league yet and the Scottish Cup is still up for grabs.
I’m not even calling this a comparison; it’s like putting an apple next to a steak pie and asking someone to judge one over the other.
Read this absolute rot from the first line of the Ibrox supporter’s piece to get a flavour of the rest of it; “Comparatively as things stand, there is little to separate the two sides domestically. The exception of course being Steven Gerrard’s inability to win either the League Cup or Scottish Cup.”
So if we discount two of the three major trophies then there’s not much between them right?
How about the fact that the guts of this team has won four trebles in a row?
I can well understand why he wants to discount the cup competitions.
He also asserts that it’s the European run that sets them apart; again, that’s garbage.
He’s judging their club on beating a hodgepodge of third rate teams with the Invincible side going up against the likes of Barcelona and Manchester City, and none of those things has anything to do with the basic question which is about which is the better team.
He asserts that we beat a side well below ourselves in finance at talent; guess what?
We’ve just lost the league to a side well below us in finance and talent.
If he really wants to talk sensibly about that he needs to acknowledge some things which he seems like he’d rather not.
First, that side was marshalled by an excellent goalkeeper at the peak of his form.
We had a defence including Sviatchenko, Boyata, Tierney and Lustig. Ajer played one game that season. One.
The midfield had a fully fit James Forrest, Patrick Roberts, Scott Sinclair flying in his player of the year debut campaign. It had a five years younger Scott Brown and Stuart Armstrong, not to mention that McGregor and Rogic had the best year of their careers.
On top of that, it had our eras second greater Skelper, Moussa Dembele, playing up front, and he would have ripped that defence of theirs to pieces.
All of this is to say nothing for the vastly superior management team we had at our dispoal then.
If their side has improved in terms of its personnel – and it has but not as much as the writer thinks – the same cannot be said about ours, which has regressed to a ridiculous, even scandalous, degree.
The article is blatantly ridiculous, because a side that went through an entire domestic campaign without losing should not be subjected to any comparison unless it’s with a side which has done the same thing, and that’s a record the NewCo won’t match even if they win every match from now until the curtain comes down on this one.
The question is too stupid to merit a reasonable answer to.
It’s frankly insulting.
Only an idiot would even attempt to compare them.
Congratulations to The Evening Times for going where even The Daily Record so far hasn’t gone.
[snack-countdown title=”Celtic’s Countdown To Champions League Disaster” date=”06/20/2021″ time=”00:00:00″ colour=”#000″ textColour=”#FFF”]