Everyone who can lift a pen right now sees Celtic as an easy target, and views taking a shot at us like striking the ball towards an open goal. An open goal, okay? We’re easy pickings for every vulture hack out there.
It will never be easier to score points on us than this.
At a time like this one, it takes a perverse kind of talent to fail as badly at the job as the veteran scraper of barrel bottoms has today in his column for The Sunday Mail.
Had he stuck to slagging Celtic he might have been alright – perhaps – but Hugh Keevins did what Keevins has a tendency to do; he veered into praise for Ibrox, its supporters and took a shot at our own fans.
And in doing so, rendered any point he was trying to make absolutely worthless.
It’s as if he just can’t help himself at times.
Keevins was right to slam our board.
His contention that we wouldn’t get certified if we had to get a Recognition of Competence from UEFA for the directors was simply him re-treading ground I went over myself just before the weekend started.
The media is good at seizing on points like these after the bloggers have made them. I expect nothing less.
He was also correct to slam the time it’s taken, the image of us scrambling around after a guy few of the fans had heard of and every other legitimate criticism he made of the way we’ve been run lately.
But to then praise Ibrox for their high-risk run on debts was preposterous and when he claimed the club was smart because the £6 million share-issue would sell out whilst we’d struggle to sell season tickets I wondered how he can live on this planet as long as he has, and work in the football culture he has spent his adult life in and still not understand anything at all.
Here’s a bet; we’ll sell 50,000 season tickets by the time the campaign starts, which is more than they are able to sell across the city.
And as to the £6 million share issue, either he is an moron to believe that they will sell out the full quota of that or the fans who bought them would have proved themselves gullible beyond belief.
This is a club whose fans are mainly working class, fans who’ve already forked out for season tickets, paid for MyGers memberships, many of whom are already in Club 1872’s scheme and who definitely don’t have an extra £500 to spend on novelty toilet paper.
There is wanting to back your club and being willing to shell out an astronomical sum such as that for a certificate to hang on the wall, representing shares which probably aren’t worth the glass and the frame they are mounted in.
If Celtic fans decide not to buy season tickets it will be because they’ve decided to take a principled stand for the betterment of the institution. Keevins wouldn’t understand that, because the words “principled stand” aren’t part of his vocabulary.
It will because they’ve calculated that it’s better to take a short-term hit than see long term damage done by continuing with a series of bad decisions.
Ibrox fans who buy into this dog and pony show of theirs will be simply confirming that they haven’t learned from previous mistakes and still back mad spending.
They think – as does Keevins – that the money will go on the team. Actually, as Phil Mac Giolla Bhain has pointed out, the vast majority of it is probably winging its way to South Africa and the Glib and Shameless tax cheat.
You really have to love their unfailing gullibility and Keevins stunning naivety in assuming that this will actually strengthen the club.
He seems pretty impressed by their use of cheap slogans.
“One class of share, one class of shareholder” … I mean what does that even mean?
The shares are worth 20p.
You’d need a hundred thousand of them just to have 0.1% of the vote, so what in God’s name is this eejit talking about?
I particularly liked it when he talked about how our “12 trophies in a row and nine years of domestic domination vanished without trace”. Eah? Vanished without a what?
Celtic’s own Twitter account carries the words Quadruple Treble Winners; whatever this clown thinks, those achievements have gone nowhere, they are enshrined in history and our hearts and minds … history, the real kind, not the kind purchased in a fire-sale.
He likes slogans? How about this one?
“One club since 1888.”
It adorns the bottom of every article on our website.
Would he care to examine its meaning?
I’m guessing not, because although it’s one of the most momentous events in the history of football on this island he has never even attempted to get to the bottom of the events of 2012 … but then he’s only a journalist with a national title, so why should he bother with frivolous nonsense like that?
All this idiot had to do here was roll the ball into an empty net.
Easy. Piece of cake.
Instead he tried to be fancy, to rub our faces in it, to try a little flick and feint and he was too old for that 25 years ago when he was booted out the Celtic Club and he’s never, in his life or his career, had the skills to pull that off.
It was an open goal and he missed it.
What an idiot that man is.