Provan Resorts To That Celtic Cliché; “I Don’t Like Him, So Ange Didn’t Sign Him.”

I would hate to still be in politics. I used to enjoy it. I used to love debating with people and trying to change their minds on stuff.

Nowadays I know I can’t.

There are segments of the population who are no longer capable of rational discussion; they have their views and they aren’t going to change them no matter how much information you try to give them.

I’m afraid to say, when faced with wilful idiocy I do tend to lose the nut.

Wilful idiocy is when someone is capable of understanding something but simply doesn’t try to. There are a lot of examples of it in the modern world, people who close their minds to anything they don’t want to hear, when opening them even a crack would let in the light.

That they simple don’t want to hear it, that they simply refuse to engage on that level is infuriating to me. Absolutely infuriating. That’s not debate any more than arguing with a three-year-old is debate. If I had to do that every single day I would actually go mad.

I feel like that sometimes reading Scottish sports journalism. It is so shoddy and loaded down with unreliable guff that I sometimes want to quit. People always ask me why I continue to read up on everything they write about Celtic; I do it so you don’t have to. If there’s anything worth reading in those clickbait sites and third rate titles, you’ll read it here.

I spend every day analysing this stuff. It’s the job.

So when I read Davie Provan indulge in one of the laziest and shabbiest practices connected with how pundits cover our club, I sit down and write about it only after composing myself so I don’t scream into a pillow first.

Today his rant about Starfelt is terrible for his resorting to cliché, for his going to sip from a puddle that was long since poisoned.

To cut a long story short, he doesn’t rate the player and because he wants to focus his ire on the board, who he hates with a burning passion, he blames them for the signing. In doing so, he’s calling Ange a witless worm.

He doesn’t use those words. He doesn’t come right out and say it.

But the logic of the position is that the board has forced this terrible footballer on the manager. It can’t possibly be that the manager himself rates the guy and signed him and now is giving him the opportunity to settle into the team next to a permanent partner.

Provan never explains why this player who is so terrible starts ahead of Welsh, Bitton and Osaze Urhoghide … no, because that might get you into a different debate than he wants. So he goes with the most rancid argument of all.

Taken to its natural conclusion, he is calling our manager a yes-man who simply accepted what he was given instead of fighting for his own choices.

Again, let me point out that the manager continues to play the player week in week out … that suggests that maybe he rates him more than others.

Unless Provan is suggesting he’s under orders there too?

In which case, his second point – that Ange should be given money in January to sign a “proper” defender – is equally brain-dead.

Because if his contention is that the board has already spent £4 million plus on a player the manager doesn’t want, what makes him think that they would let him have the final say in the next window?

Joined up thinking is not Provan’s strong suit.

That he has reached for the bottom rung of the ladder here in trotting out this discredited theory should be enough for rational people to dismiss this story outright. Are we really supposed to believe that Ange is so insightful that the successful signings are all down to him and the less good ones were done by someone else?

Hell, if you were that good, why would you let anyone else make these decisions in the first place?

Why would anyone want to go over your head when you have a perfect score?

Starfelt has been a Celtic player all of three months.

It is shocking that so many hacks are already sharpening their knives over this guy, and whether they know it or not they are insulting the manager with all this talk of him accepting players signed by the board.

I just want to grab this guy by the lapels and scream at him; “You don’t like the guy, so Ange didn’t sign him! Do you know how goddamned stupid you sound? How petty? How childish? How moronic? Do you realise how dumb that whole argument is?”

This is why I can’t do political activism anymore. It would go badly. I cannot deal with wilfully stupid people on a face to face basis.

It’s hard enough reviewing their “journalism.”