Celtic Reject Boyd’s Pathetic Non-Apology As The Backlash Grows.

Last night, I compared Kris Boyd’s pitiful non-apology to the tactics being used by Boris Johnson.

The parallels do not stop there.

The way he’s gone about “clarifying” this has, as with Johnson, only grown the scandal instead of putting it to bed. It is a classic miscalculation. If Boyd thought that this was the end of the matter, he was very, very wrong.

Last night, the media were briefed that Celtic are furious about this and are entirely unconvinced by what he put in the paper yesterday.

This does not surprise me one bit, as I said in the Johnson piece last night. Those running Celtic know when we’re being fed a line, they know when we are being taken for mugs. The fans are just as tuned in and recognise what this is.

So the idea that Celtic will accept that and let the matter close is for the birds.

Had Boyd shown the slightest contrition, even of the false kind, even if we knew that his grovelling was insincere but the act of it punished him with humiliation, I think Celtic would have been content to drop the matter and move forward.

That Boyd opted instead for sarcasm and insulting our intelligence is, I think, certain only to have made the club more determined to push this.

And into the mix today comes the first journalistic condemnation, from Davie Provan no less.

It is most welcome.

Although he doesn’t name Boyd, he makes it clear that no journalist would ever condone violence against a player.

Of course they wouldn’t.

Provan must not be the only person in their profession who does this.

If you’re interested in seeing how the media covered Boyd’s interview before Celtic made their statement last night you need only check Newsnow or the other aggregator sites.

They had the story because they used chunks of his article to fill out their own pieces and drive traffic to their sites.

They knew Celtic fans were furious because many of the blogs had covered this subject in detail.

So it wasn’t as if Celtic’s statement was the first they heard of it.

Yet every single mainstream publication chose to ignore what Boyd had written, and only covered his words after Celtic made their displeasure clear.

It should not have taken Celtic to do that before the rest of the press highlighted, and condemned, those shocking remarks.

This guy stinks out their profession, and I’ve been writing that for long enough.

Now he is a millstone around its neck.

They need to defend their own reputations from guilt by association with this lout.

If they didn’t realise that what he had written was beyond the pale, then they are too stupid to hold jobs in the media.

If they did know – and of course they did – then they are just as bad as the cowardly Tory MP’s who have yet to submit their No Confidence letters, knowing as they do that Johnson has to go.

If any of them try to defend Boyd, they will be just as shamed as those cabinet secretaries who have been wearily trudging through the TV studios these last few weeks shredding the remnants of their own dignity as they parrot the lame and frankly ridiculous excuses of Downing Street’s serial liar.

Every one of them will be just as tainted as he is.

Celtic will not allow any dead-cat strategy to distract us here.

The blogs will not allow any further pitiful “clarification” to hide the pure and simple facts of this.

Boyd’s words do not require translation or unravelling or second guessing or reinterpretation because they are quite clear and they don’t get less shocking the more you read them.

That man lamented that nobody in the Ibrox team had tried to seriously injure Callum McGregor.

That’s what he did, and he did it in a national newspaper.

If he were still playing the game the SFA would have hauled him over the coals for bringing the sport into disrepute and suspended him from football for a spell. Nobody would have defended him.

When does the media accept that it has responsibilities?

When does it accept that there are things that it is simply not permitted to do?

If a blogger had written something as inflammatory as that, I would, as a member of this community, have been appalled and called it out in the strongest terms because there is a line and that crosses it.

I wouldn’t have been alone in doing so.

Yet the mainstream press still looks down its collective nose at this community and others like it as the preserve of the fanatic and the raving loon. Most days I’m perfectly happy to just carry on working and not even debate that wholly idiotic view.

But today the fanatic wears their robes, not ours.

Today the raving loon is in their ranks, not mine.

If they want to wrap a protective blanket around him either by making excuses or by their silence, then they make his disgrace their disgrace.

This one is not going away.

This one has plenty of road left to run.

Boyd appears on Sky tomorrow; before he does, this matter needs to be properly dealt with. Those who are slated to appear on the panel with him better decide quickly what their own reputations are worth.

Because Sky can’t ignore this and neither can they.