Of Course Souness Dismisses The Celtic Manager’s Loyalty. He Had None Himself.

There is an ancient clip of one of the original Only An Excuse shows, back when it was a radio broadcast, where “Graeme Souness” discusses his career where he says “When I was with Middlesbrough I was a Spurs fan who had always supported Liverpool and so the only club I would have left England for would have been Sampdoria because when I was a kid I used to skip school in Edinburgh and sneak into Italy to watch them.”

What makes it great, even today, is that it’s a send up of a guy with no stake in anything but himself.

A guy who never put anything in his life in front of what it is that he wanted in any given moment.

You saw a shining example of it this week when he trashed his own reputation as the guy who brought Rangers into the right century by signing Catholics by boasting about how the “Protestant ethos” of the place led him to adopt the Queen’s picture on the wall.

He did that as an act of self-promotion, and he didn’t care that it contradicted years of telling people that he had no time for any of that stuff. Souness is a chameleon, an ever evolving specimen, a guy who changes to suit the prevailing wind.

He’s also famously disloyal, as David Murray was at great pains to point out when he left Rangers in the lurch to take the job at Liverpool.

Even worse was the way he behaved there, when as manager of the club he became a pariah in that city for a grotesque front page story in the hated Sun newspaper, for which he was paid (he said he donated the cash to a local hospital) and which appeared on the third anniversary of Hillsborough. He has expressed remorse for this several times, but that he ever did such a thing in the first place is a supreme example of his egotism, arrogance and self-absorption.

All this is to say that if someone is going to discuss the character of Ange Postecoglou and his commitment to Celtic it should probably be somebody else, because Souness doesn’t understand commitment or loyalty except when it comes to himself.

“He’ll be looking at it this way,” he said on TalkSport. “Things are going well at Celtic, I’ll get a better offer than Brighton down the line’. That’s the top and bottom of it for me. If Man United, Liverpool or one of the other big guys came calling I don’t think there would be much loyalty …I don’t see this as loyalty – I see it as a straight choice between a truly good football club and managing a provincial team in the best league in the world.”

And what’s his basis for saying that? That he met Ange briefly in a Glasgow restaurant. Which obviously allowed him to gain this deep an d meaningful insight, right?

I rather think not.