Celebrity MasterChef Loser Mouths Off About Celtic Defender Yet Again.

It must be great to be a former footballer trying to get going in a media career.

Even if your starting point isn’t great, even if you’re not particularly good at it or suited to it, even if you do everything in your power to get early headlines and an early leg-up and end up nowhere, there is still a kernel of hope.

You can even go on Celebrity Master Chef and get knocked out in the first round and know you can still turn it around.

You can graduate to regional radio and know that it need not be the end point.

Because as long as you have one weapon in reserve you’ve got a shot.

Here’s what you do, and it’s easy. You ready for this?

Criticise Celtic. Pick a player or the manager or the fans, and hammer on a negative point. It doesn’t matter how inconsistent or irrational you sound to the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter whether you have a working, functioning, brain cell in your head. It doesn’t matter if you plainly don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.

Work based on that basic principle – that criticising Celtic gets you headlines – and you will find yourself frequently appearing in the papers.

This all Noel Whelan does. He has never written an intelligent or insightful piece of commentary on any subject. Tonight it’s Starfelt; of course it is. He’s one of the easiest targets to take a shot at in the whole of Scottish football right now.

But really, if it wasn’t him it would be some other aspect of our club.

He has twigged that there’s no easier gig than taking shots at Celtic and now that he has that’s his bread and butter, his reason for being, and it must be hard for him to think that he struggled all those years to make it when in fact the answer was so obvious this whole time.

People like Kris Boyd can grasp it.

It doesn’t take genius to work this stuff out.

Whelan’s attack on Starfelt isn’t just ignorant or stupid or an example of how former players now love nothing more than piling on and putting current stars under pressure … it’s sheer laziness, the mark of somebody who’s found the path of least resistance and is sticking to it.

This is what has replaced talent in the punditry business.

See, Whelan, if you had talent in the first place, I daresay Celebrity Master Chef wouldn’t have been such an attractive port of call, because you wouldn’t need that to give yourself profile. If you had talent you wouldn’t need such gimmicks.

If that seems harsh it’s no more so than the feeding frenzy involving our club right now, targeting our players and our manager. These people are circling like vultures, and it requires a constant effort to combat their incessant negativity.

With folk this that’s easy to do.

Because for all they get the headlines, that tabloid writing gig still proves elusive. When Boyd has a job at a national title and you don’t that must really screw with your internal wiring. It must really eat away at the old self esteem.