The Record is good at times, you have to give it to them.
For days now I’ve been waiting on their piece about how we stood for Glen Kamara but backed our own player in the way Slavia Prague did when Alexander Tonev was accused of the racially abusing Shay Logan.
I knew that some enterprising hack would bring it up, at some point.
But I never expected them to fold it into a story about how Scott Brown might struggle to win over some of the Aberdeen fans.
Bravo to them for that, it’s an angle I’d never have expected.
It’s also a new low for them over there, to try and hang what was a club decision around the neck of our captain as if he and he alone stood up for our player.
Of course, this is no different than Gerrard himself and the Liverpool players standing up for Luis Suarez, but the press doesn’t want to go into that.
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Scott Brown did nothing that any captain of any club would not have done in the same situation … it’s as I said in a lengthy piece last week; in choosing to so firmly align themselves with the Ibrox player and thus accept his claim on face value, an awful lot of clubs have exposed themselves to the danger of being called out as hypocrites somewhere down the line.
I thought we had needlessly exposed ourselves to that attack by jumping on the bandwagon and assuming a player’s guilt before a hearing, and I knew that an article like this was going to come.
But The Record amazed me how they’ve pursued it.
Brian Irvine might even believe that all he was being asked to do was explore a difficult point … in fact he was being fitted up as The Record finally found its angle of attack.
“I know there was the incident with Tonev a few years ago but that was an awkward one for Brown as Celtic captain,” Irvine said. “He might have felt he had to defend one of his teammates and if he wasn’t a witness to the incident then it put him in a difficult spot.”
The only people trying to put Brown “in a difficult spot” are the writers on that rag of a newspaper, because they know full well that the players of every club in this country would have stood by their own team-mate in the same circumstances.
I defy anyone at that paper to prove me wrong; give me a single example of a club turning a player out when the allegation was racism and there were not witnesses from both sides or TV footage to prove what had taken place.
Even when there is footage, most clubs make a player apologise and stand by him anyway.
Brown does not deserve to be scapegoated for this … it’s a diabolical piece, a nasty, spiteful article which finds the level of the gutter and tries to go lower still.