That Was A Terrible Week For The Craziness Of The Anti-Celtic Media

Today I’ve decided to do something I never have before, which is to go through the last week of news day by day.

The reason I’ve decided to is that this was a vintage week for our sporting press, a week that was as good a showcase for how nutty they are, how despicable they can be and how low they are willing to for an anti-Celtic story.

The manager of our club has had to endure a torrid time of it, and to be honest I could probably have done this for every week in the past month.

I think they’ve been absolutely appalling, and whilst that’s the standard we have come to expect of them there was an element of nuttiness, of desperation, this past seven days which was astonishing.

So here it is, starting from last Sunday.

A week in which our crazy media was shown up at its very, very worst and most unprofessional.

Click on the button that says Next to continue … 

Sunday: The Disgrace Of Alan Nixon

Sunday was a bad day for the media in general; their response to the events at Pittodrie and Ibrox were typically abysmal and cowardly.

Although Celtic didn’t suffer any major bad decision, the refereeing was shocking with our game getting stopped every chance the officials could, to award free kicks against our players.

The media response to what happened at Ibrox was predictable.

They patted Hibs on the head, with a few patronising comments about how the club had done well to run the home side close, just so they didn’t have to say what was obvious; that the away team was robbed.

But the main issue I had with them was with Alan Nixon, who’s weekend started with shamelessly using our manager’s name in an attention seeking piece about the career prospects of ex footballer Andrey Shevchenko, the Ukrainian boss who wants a move to British club football.

With nothing to go on whatsoever, on no evidence, not even on the back of an off-record quote, in an act of spite, just to get a cheap headline, Nixon linked him with the Celtic job when our manager has only been in the gig a few months and is still in the process of getting his team together.

That article was a flat-out disgrace and Nixon ought to have apologised for it.

Monday: More Clickbait Nonsense On The Manager.

Alan Nixon’s piece was the opening salvo in a ridiculous week when the manager’s job was discussed in several different outlets and with several different names used in connection to it.

The worst of the lot of them came on Monday, when John Terry’s name was thrown into the hat.

What a joke that idea is.

It’s barely worth pointing out the obvious problems with it, the biggest of which of course is that Celtic has a manager already, as I said on the day.

The press was equally bad on the other big story of the day, which was that the Czech government had demanded an apology from the SFA for the scandalous comments Marvin Bartley made in relation to their country.

The press backed him and a week later no apology has been issued; in the interim the press is calling the Sparta game in Scotland a “high risk” fixture.

Yeah, no shit. Especially with the slander against their whole nation.

Tuesday: The “Kyogo To The EPL” Story Rears Its Ugly Head.

It had to happen, didn’t it? But who expected that it would happen so early on?

He’s been in the country less time than the manager, in his role less time than a Celtic CEO, and already the press is linking him with a move to the Premiership, the league which someone missed him until he was 26 and playing his football in Scotland.

This was predictable from the moment he got his Celtic Park hat-trick. The media was always going to play this wee game with us, but I thought they might wait until January at least. What a joke it is that they are playing this card so soon.

God, they must really be worried about this guy.

The Marvin Bartley story rumbled on, with him refusing to apologise and although that makes our nation look like a backward joke, the media said nothing.

It was also a vintage day for Charlie Nicholas; he chipped in with his latest anti-Celtic rant.

What was it about? Who knows?

He does it so frequently now that you get the impression he does it because he can, and because he gets some kind of kick out of it.

The SPFL finally stepped in with a decision to roll back the requirements for red zones.

The press started right away on the idea that this would guarantee the Ibrox club tickets for Celtic Park; if they’d read the small print they’d know that’s not what the decision said.

Wednesday: The Embarrassing “Celtic Fan Survey” Which “Warned” Ange.

Wednesday was a real day for the moonhowling Record. A truly vintage piece of dire garbage from one of their writers, which masqueraded as a “Celtic Fan Survey” which had a “warning” for our manager.

Imagine commissioning a poll and then trying to spin your own results to get a negative headline!

This is what The Record did, trying to insist that only a minority of our supporters would blame the board if the club didn’t win the title.

Of course, the poll turned out not to say anything of the kind; more than 80% of those polled would have held the board at least mostly accountable, but The Record reported only highlighted the votes of those who would not blame the manager or the players in any way … and that number, by the way, was still more than 40% of those polled.

The crazy thing is, I would never have bothered about The Record’s daft poll without them putting that incendiary “warning” headline on it … but having paid attention to it I was amused to find that it had measured the views of a mere 700 people.

I did say that the average Celtic site would have gotten more responses than that.

My mate Paddy Sinat proved it. Without the article trending on the news aggregators, and although he only ran the poll for one piece, he got a response three times bigger than that in a few hours … and in that one, of more than 2300 fans, 95% said they would blame the Celtic board and not the manager if we failed to win the title.

Is that a warning too?

On the same day, John Hartson asked the Celtic board to issue a statement in support of our manager; I wrote about how silly that idea was.

On top of that, Frank McAvennie had a rant about Greg Taylor which was widely scorned on social media and in the blogs.

Oh yeah … and Alex Rae talked about how refs weren’t biased, Ian Murray predicted that we might finish fourth in the league and Kris Boyd ranted about our title chances; it was as if the press went to every one of our enemies on the same day and asked them what they thought.

Thursday: Davie Provan And A Boardroom Revelation

Davie Provan was the star of Thursday with his piece of excretal lazy journalism about Carl Starfelt, falling back on one of the worst of all arguments; that because a player looks out of sorts at the moment in the Celtic system that “Ange didn’t sign this guy.”

Amazingly, a well know podcast with links to the mainstream media was actually promoting a similar narrative today about people inside the club controlling the team selection over the head of the manager.

This is such abysmal speculation.

Provan doesn’t want to criticise the manager directly, or the players; he’s an anti-board writer and he knows who his target is.

But there are legitimate avenues down which to attack them, and this really isn’t one of them.

It’s desperate stuff.

A much better piece of journalism was that of The Athletic’s resident Celtic snooper, Kieran Devlin, who alleged that Celtic had been on the brink of appointing Fergal Harkin as our Director of Football before boardroom squabbling halted the move.

If true that’s a pretty remarkable piece of work he’s done there … proving that not everyone in our media is an incompetent joke.

There are good journalists out there.

Friday: A Rolling Rampage Of Ridiculous Headlines.

Friday was a big, big day for daft media stories; I’ll start with one of the more serious ones.

Alison McConnell suggested that Celtic should give Ibrox fans tickets for our ground in the next league game so that we can “take the moral high ground.”

She never actually points out a single advantage of doing so. Because there isn’t one. This is part of another standard media narrative, that although we never started this we should be the ones to finish it. What a stupid suggestion that is.

The day also saw the latest ludicrous Celtic title race prediction; a suggestion that we might finish as low as fifth, another ex-Ibrox player indulging in his flight of fantasy. The papers shouldn’t be writing any of this dreck, but it just keeps on coming.

On the same day, the SFA meeting over VAR went well; Sutton made sure of some headlines by pointing out that certain people will be sorry if it comes to pass, provided the system is run correctly and by the book. Big if, but his central point is bang on.

We also had the latest Sky confirmations on which games they’ll be showing live; more critical Celtic away games that we thought might be shown have been missed off the schedule completely.

It is now standard stuff for us to pay PPV contracts to individual clubs and there is no end of this in sight as this season rolls on.

The question is, will this be a permanent thing?

But none of those were the story of the day; that belonged to those in the media who saw in the Newcastle takeover a chance to butter up Ibrox with suggestions that their one note manager was a prime candidate for taking over as manager there.

The story is ludicrous of course, as any sane person is well aware.

Which didn’t stop Chris Jack writing the most barmy story in a barmy week, a masterpiece of fantasy thinking and denial of reality which should have been labelled under science fiction.

Saturday: Chris Sutton Hits The Mark … McAvennie Hits The Wall.

Three stories yesterday, two of them from Big Chris Sutton.

The first one I disagreed with slightly; would Ange really get a second season at Parkhead if the first wasn’t successful?

That’s a question that there’s really no easy way to answer. For a lot of our fans they cannot even contemplate second place.

For others, they want to see signs that the revolution is moving the correct way.

What would constitute a failure so complete that Ange couldn’t survive?

Sutton doesn’t say, but he hints at it in the second point he made.

He scorned those in the media who think that Celtic will finish outside of the top two. He even questioned whether some of these muppets even believe what it is they are saying; I agree with him completely on that front. They are trolling.

And one of the biggest trolls stuck his two bobs worth in for the second time in a week; McAvennie, this time having a rant about Ralston.

He had criticised Taylor earlier in the week; he literally went from one side of the pitch to the other and started in there.

Pathetic, and a fitting end to the week he had.