The Evening Times Has Published A Ludicrous Defence For Freddy The Ned.

The Evening Times used to be a “quality paper.” Remember that? Back when the organisation that owned it took itself seriously. Before it went into “blogging.” Before it started hiring cut and paste experts. Remember those days?

When did the downhill slide begin? When it started giving ex-players columns? Or before that? I do know I used to be baffled that any publication gave space to someone like Derek Johnstone, whose work was often unreadable even after an editor had gone over it. We now regard those days, and those columns, as a relative high point.

Today they are giving Neil Warnock a platform to accuse Hibs players of going out of their way to deliberately wind up Alfredo Morelos.

“Wait, what?” I hear you say, with deep sarcasm. “Surely that shouldn’t be allowed?”

This is mitigation for Mad Dog. This is someone trying to say that it’s not his fault. But I ask you; why did Hibs players think they could pull this off? And isn’t the onus on Morelos to behave himself rather than on them playing nice?

What a pitiful argument to make in his favour.

Of course Hibs players were trying to wind him up. When even I, a layperson, can see that this is a viable strategy for teams how does Warnock expect managers to miss that or to pass it up?

As I’ve said often on this site, if you give Mad Dog a dig in the first five minutes of a game you own him. He forgets he’s there to play football and starts rampaging about the pitch trying to settle scores. Everyone in Scottish football knows this.

It is up to his club to settle him down, and then up to the player himself to behave. Warnock himself was a nut-case on the pitch at times and I’m sure he was frequently the target for similar tactics, and I am 100% certain that he has dished that treatment out to others.

Almost all professional footballers have, and do, on a regular basis.

Warnock either pretends not to know that or hopes the rest of us don’t. But The Evening Times printing this as if it were wisdom from the Gods shows how far that paper has sunk from its heyday.

Yeah, the one where Darryl King used to write for them.