Remember Tam McManus?
No, me neither, not much.
He leaves no impression as a footballer at all in the wider world outside those who follow the teams he played for and I wonder how much they actually do.
He had more teams than Football Manager; that’s the mark of someone who bounced around and never found a club where he was a star.
Before we go any further, I’m not a snob about this stuff.
There are a handful of ex-footballers who have erudition and wit and a real canny understanding of the game, and they make excellent pundits because they can make sense of football and its complexities in a manner which appeals to the pub crowd and the armchair analyst both.
I have never heard Tam McManus articulate an original thought.
He is one of a number of ex-players in Scotland who is considered an authority on football simply because they played the game but who’s actual knowledge and understanding of it is far below that of either of the fan stereotypes I mentioned above.
The pub guy knows more than McManus.
The armchair analyst is a football Einstein next to him.
I have no way of knowing what kind of “audience” McManus gets for his radio stuff or the gormless writing he puts out, but when someone is forced to chase numbers by ever more outlandish statements that’s probably not a sign that he’s putting the heavyweights of football journalism in any peril.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
His latest witless grab for attention is to say that Ibrox’s second string could beat Celtic, a statement which manages to be both sycophantic and idiotic in equal degrees.
He has managed to get his tongue further up Gerrard’s posterior than I ever thought possible.
He thinks this is a barb which will sting those at Parkhead; it’s the buzzing of a fly.
But it’s emblematic of that attention seeking trait amongst the passengers of Scottish sports journalisms clown car, the one that contains the likes of English and Boyd and, worryingly, Sutton, the sort of people who crave the spotlight so much that they don’t care how far down the reality TV road they need to go in order to get it.
It is quite pathetic.
McManus knows his latest ranting is fit only for the comedy club, if it were at all funny and not just him rattling on the bars. The Scottish press knows it as well, but that hasn’t stopped some of them trying to drum up a phony “controversy” on the back of it.
McManus has a peculiar fascination with Celtic, peculiar for someone with no connection to the club at all.
He spends an awful lot of his time, it seems to me, banging on about what a state we’re in.
Perhaps he should worry about his own fledgling credibility and what talking this kind of crap does to it.
People like this are an embarrassment to our national sport and at a bad time for it.
There are serious things happening in our game and all these people do is make it more difficult for the real conversations to be had.