The Record’s Idiotic Starfelt Rating Should Be Scorned By Every Celtic Fan.

The Daily Record has chosen its next target in a Celtic strip.

It is hardly surprising that the target in question is Carl Starfelt. I have never known that publication to give any defensive player at Celtic an easy time of it, and when they find someone they think they can pound on they go all it.

Their task is made easier by a segment of our support which is congenitally incapable of giving a player time to settle and is constantly looking for scapegoats.

The Record’s decision to award Starfelt a five for his performance today is not only abysmal, it is nakedly and shamelessly biased. It is a decision based not on what happened on the pitch today but on what they expected to happen on the pitch instead.

Morelos and Roofe were supposed to run riot against this guy. Instead he performed admirably.

Gannon’s rating is based on his “weakness in the air” which alone is grounds for not taking it remotely seriously.

It’s in the air where Starfelt has been most commanding for Celtic so far.

It’s his tendency to do silly stuff on the deck which had the press drooling before the game.

He was beaten today at the corner, but Helander has a 3-inch height advantage on him and that, more than anything else, is what made the difference. But The Record, having made up its mind on him, is determined to hammer that point home.

No player in Scotland has had such a relentless and sustained period of negative scrutiny on him, not since Barkas, and nobody in Scotland will have.

It’s only at Parkhead that players are not allowed to make mistakes, not allowed to have a settling in period, not allowed to put a foot wrong.

That some of our fans give succour to this garbage is truly shocking.

The same writer gave 6’s to Ralston and Welsh, which are ridiculous ratings in themselves when you consider they were both rock solid. I thought Ralston was a man of the match contender for the way he played.

The agenda – to continue pressuring Celtic by painting us as suspect at the back – is now set in stone and playing out in full, even though we coped perfectly well against their best forwards without looking in any real trouble.

Our fans should know better than to entertain this.

Anyone in our support making Starfelt the whipping boy for today is doing an immense disservice to the player and to the club. I cannot put it more bluntly than to say they should beware of doing the enemy’s job for him.

John Hartson’s singling him out in the aftermath of the game was a good indicator for why he’s never tried coaching; his reading of a game is deficient, as David Walton at HailHail67 has pointed out in his own article on the subject.

That report, and the agenda behind it, should be scorned by every one of our fans.

It doesn’t even hide what it’s trying to do.