Yesterday, we talked about Andy Walker and Celtic’s decision to ban him from the ground.
Last night I was delighted to join the boys on the Endless Celts podcast again, and we talked about that decision and how ridiculous and even scandalous it is.
In the decision being made public after the Ibrox club’s it looks, again, as if we are simply following them, in another example of Old Firm Inc.
It’s as if the logic of the position is that since both clubs have done it there’s nothing that Sky can do.
Would you take bets on that proving to be a good assessment of things?
What’s far more likely is that both clubs will be forced into a humiliating climb-down, which is what we deserve for such an act of pettiness and spite, simply because Walker criticised the board.
Most of us understand the difference between someone like Walker offering criticism and a sneering halfwit like Boyd taking shots at us and inventing stories just because he can’t stand us.
Walker himself sensationalises at times and appears to shoot at the board sometimes just for the sake of it, but I know that when the chips are down he is, in fact, broadly sympathetic to our club, which he proved in his heartfelt anger at the board over the Dubai issue.
Walker genuinely believes that sequence of events was a stain on us.
For dozens of people at Celtic to take that trip to a billionaires play-ground when the rest of this country was in lockdown, with many fearing for their livelihoods and those who were sheltering fearing for their very lives was a travesty, and unbecoming of us.
It was an act of tone-deaf selfishness for which Lawwell rightly apologised. Walker is right; that decision was a stain on us and the club acknowledged it.
That’s what makes Walker getting banned even worse; the club, through the CEO, recognized that we were wrong. The decision to ban him is nonsensical.
But even if this weren’t indefensible from a moral standpoint – and it is – and even if it were not remarkably stupid and corrupt to follow Ibrox into this morass, the decision would still stink because it gets us into a pointless battle which we cannot win.
Sky won’t accept this, any more than they’d accept it if we told Boyd he wasn’t allowed back.
I’ve now given up hope that Celtic would act to stop that little pipsqueak from sneering his way through our games; that’s why I write now, more regularly, that the broadcaster only embarrasses itself by paying a salary to such a halfwit, incapable of an original thought, a man whose brain cells rattle when he walks.
But that battle would have been worth the candle.
It would have been worth it just to have him run wailing to one of the papers which pays him for his inane babble. He would have moaned his wee face off and we could then have banned them too.
It would have been a momentous fight, and perhaps because he is, after all, an idiot at least one of them might have decided that he’s simply not worth defending in a bare knuckle battle with our club.
Taking on Sky over Walker, arm in arm with Ibrox?
This is the ditch we’ve chosen to die in? Really?
This is typical of how short-sighted, stupid and out of touch with reality our board has become.
Few can think Andy Walker is worth a fight like this.
Few enough believe the club is justified in its actions here; absolutely nobody believes he’s worth the trouble this could cause.
The broadcaster will fight for him because it has to.
They will win too, because they have Scottish football by the balls.
I’m sure that, in the short term at least, somebody at the club felt his self-image boosted by this action.
That person should look back in the mirror after the humiliating climb-down which we are absolutely certain to have to make to over the affair.
Because that person will have made his own personal annoyance over what Walker said into a very real problem for the club itself, and we should all be concerned about that.
It’s another example of the egotism of the small men running things putting their own hurt feelings above the good of the institution itself.
Their pride was dented, and they used Celtic to lash out.
They should not kid themselves on, or the rest of us either, that this was done with the club’s good name in mind; they have tarnished that name acting in such a vindictive way towards a man doing his job.
I would be concerned enough if this was a battle we actually stood a chance of winning, but we don’t so it’s clumsy and incompetent on top of everything else.
But then, that’s Celtic right now; stuck in the mud unless we’re chasing down nonsense like this.
After 70 days of silence, this is how the club chooses to get back in the news.
What dreadful “leaders” we presently have.
They make Douglas Ross look competent.