I love how predictable our media is.
Let me tell you how predictable they are.
Last week, when I wrote the article about how Celtic Park should not host the Scottish Cup Final I did so knowing that if the Ibrox club went out before that game that I would write the piece I posted last night, the one about how we should host it after all.
Because the idea of taking the game to Parkhead had become such common currency amongst the hacks that I wanted to embarrass them with it.
It was just such an obvious piece of media trolling in light of all the pieces that followed our defeat, about how such a “showpiece” match deserved to have supporters at it.
Or at least, it did when a certain club was still in the competition and it was assumed that they would win it.
I had a feeling that once they went out that all this talk would cease and the idea would finally be knocked on the head, and of course it was.
To me, this just seemed like a perfect opportunity to hoist the hacks by their own petard, as Shakespeare once put it.
I said that the whole idea of having it at Parkhead was something they were proposing just to screw with us … how amazing that little over 24 hours from Ibrox’s club going out the idea was consigned to the bin.
So yeah, when I wrote the first one I knew I’d write last night’s article.
And because I believed that the idea would die a pretty quick death, I knew I’d write this one as well.
Before I go on, I want to clarify something, and I don’t usually like to do this.
Kevin Bridges tells a great story about how he once ended up in a fight – sort of anyway – with a guy in a lift because an off-hand jokey remark about Ribena went wrong.
He was in Australia and was drinking the stuff when a guy got in the lift with him and laughed at his choice of beverage.
“Aye,” Bridges said. “Ribena. Party time.”
It was, as he says, “the sort of thing you’d never say if you knew you were going to have to repeat it” several times.
The joke is about the Glasgow accent, and how some people can’t understand it.
But I think it was also about people who are so dumb that their sense of humour valve doesn’t work when the joke is more sophisticated than “knock knock.”
A specific group of people reading this know it’s a reference to them.
One specific person should be hiding under the bed out of embarrassment.
You make the proverbial box of rocks look intelligent, and whilst I understand that particular joke is about two levels above what you can understand the rest of the readers get it, so my work is done.
I’ll spare you the further embarrassment of naming and shaming you, but enough readers will recognise you from the description.
Taking that piece seriously last night – as you evidently did – is one thing, but using it to try and score points against the blog and the hardworking people who admin the Facebook group only makes you look like a fourth rate idiot, struggling just to make that grade.
As if missing not just the point of the joke but that it was a joke didn’t already do that.
(Just for future reference, unnamed individual; when I’m promoting the idea that we are skint and need money from the SFA more than the club at Ibrox that’s a sign that I’m not being wholly serious. Most people didn’t need me to point that out.)
But of course, even when I’m kidding I’m usually making a serious point and the serious point last night was that since the media had promoted the idea it would be interesting to see how they themselves managed to hit the reverse gear.
Would they do it reluctantly, shame-faced, or as brazenly as I put it in my opening paragraph?
In the end, they opted to palm it off as a decision already taken by the beaks at Hampden; the game would go ahead there after all, in front of no supporters.
Which, to me, is a pretty shocking option when Murrayfield – far and away the best venue if Hampden is not usable – is available and just up the road and offers all that sports fans could want.
Part of this is parochialism of course; the SFA would rather the match was played in Cathkin Park than go cap in hand to an outside organisation like Scottish Rugby.
It is so pitifully small-minded of them and I am sure Dominic McKay recognises it as such.
The thing is, we all suspect that the option of Celtic Park came off the table pronto after St Johnstone’s penalties win, because up until then the SFA had remained dead quiet about all this and let the media do the running, with the promotion of Parkhead as the venue gaining traction more with every passing day.
It was the option everybody seemed keen on.
Had the Ibrox club got past the Perth side we’d be hearing it in Dolby 5.1 by now, and no mistake.
Just 24 hours after they went out, the idea is as dead as Julius Caesar.
Every single one of us is keen for normality to be restored.
For a lot of us, fans in football grounds again will be an awesome confirmation that our lives are finally exiting this horrible place we’ve been stuck in for a year.
Celtic fans get this in a way that supporters of few other clubs do, because it was the last ditch cancellation of an event we were all looking forward to – going to Ibrox to scud them, as we would certainly have done – which ushered in this dark period in the first place.
For us, seeing fans back in grounds in Scotland is powerfully symbolic and if we can’t be there we would at least watch others do it with something approaching hope and optimism.
The SFA has decided to put hope and optimism on hold, and I am certain that part of their haste in doing so is that Ibrox’s legions no longer have that day to look forward to.
Because mark my words, if they were still in the tournament the SFA would have offered the final to Celtic, and once we turned it down for all the obvious reasons the media would have beaten the Hell out of us for it.
That the SFA has stopped even looking at alternatives tells you what the objective was here all along.
They won’t even offer it now to Ibrox, because that would be to reveal the scam for what it was the whole time.
The game should go to Murrayfield, as I said in the original article on it … and fans should be allowed to attend.
It’s the second major cup final this season not to include a team from Glasgow.
It should be a celebration of all that’s good in the game.
The SFA has opted to put their own pride and egos first.
You despair of these people at times.