Keevins Doesn’t “Feel Sorry For Celtic.” He And His Profession Mourn For Themselves.

Today, Keevins was yammering away in his latest article about how much sympathy he felt for us and for the club across the city when Nathan Patterson spoke of his arriving at Goodison to find that the long-term stalwart he’s replacing is a die-hard Celtic fan.

Keevins feels sorry for us – he says – because Coleman would have loved to be part of a Celtic team playing in the English league. I daresay he’s right. He mourns that Celtic and the club across the city do not get to test themselves in that environment.

But you know what?

It’s bullshit, and it’s the same old bullshit our media has been talking for years and I long since lost patience with it.

Keevins and the hacks have been pushing this line for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never thought it was about the good of the clubs.

It certainly is not for the good of the Scottish game as a whole; no group does more to talk down the sport in this country than the West of Scotland media that is supposed to cover it.

They are a joke. They would reduce this game to the League Of Ireland and for what end?

For their own glorification, of course.

For decades they framed the whole game around two clubs.

They are the purveyors of the Survival Lie in part because their own relevance depends on it.

Without being able to cover “the Old Firm” as they label it, what would their own worth be? Not even provincial nobodies covering a backwater. These guys could not abide the loss of their own prestige.

This is about their own egotism, nothing more.

These people want to swan around the boardrooms of Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge and have access to the players they idolise from afar. They want to travel in luxury to European finals as swaggering “representatives” of super-clubs; but these people are parasites living off the sport and sucking the marrow from its bones.

And you know what? Fair play to them, if only they admitted it.

If the English lost their TV money a lot of their own hacks would pine for the days when they covered the biggest league in the world. They would miss the fame that conferred on them, and the cash too probably.

Where I have a real problem with what the hacks here do is in their constant denigration of the game and their insistence that we should view it as they do; as some show entirely distant from the real one south of the border.

We are told that we should aspire to “more” than just being English football’s poor relation, and that’s a noble ambition until you realise what they mean is that we should get out the begging bowl and go whoring it to their league and take whatever we’re offered.

If that means starting at the bottom so be it; but maybe Celtic sees itself as too big a club to start at the bottom of the English pyramid.

At the same time, we’re constantly told that we should be almost ashamed of our own triumphs and achievements.

That it is somehow small-minded to want to win your domestic league and not fantasise about coming sixth in another one.

The media here in Scotland wastes a lot of its energy on this issue, a dead issue, instead of promoting what we have right here.

They scorn it instead.

It is they who long for England; I think some of them fantasise about press awards in London, about hobnobbing with the cream at the very top. I think guys like Keith Jackson actually believe they could get a seat at a table there … what idiots they are.

It wouldn’t matter what games these people were covering; Hugh Keevins isn’t going to turn into Jamie Jackson or Chris Jack into Jonathon Wilson. English sportswriters are so far in front of this lot and their ilk that it’s where the real gulf lies.

Not a one of these desperados is in that class; even covering our local product is too much for their stunted intellects.

Keevins feels sad only for himself and his dying trade, and it wasn’t Scottish football being a backwater that killed that trade. It was their advertisement of Scottish football as a backwater.

And it’s only one if you look at it through the English lens.

There are enough of us in the blogosphere making a living covering our own clubs to convince you that Scottish football could have a media like that south of the border, if the proprietors of the major outlets didn’t dumb down and treat the audience like mugs.

That is the real shame here. That is the real thing to feel sorry over.

That our game has such abysmal coverage around it.

Instead of enjoying what we have they long for something else, and that taints almost everything they do, that and the bias favouring one club.

Keevins should spare us the pity sermon.

We don’t need to hear it because we know who it’s really for.