Keith Jackson’s Anti-Celtic Screed Today Was Gutless, Hypocritical Nonsense.

The pencils were all sharpened and ready to write about how we’d blown a five point lead and that Ibrox was now neck and neck with us.

You know that this was the narrative being prepared. Hacks who fully expected their favourites to win at the weekend were poised, at 2-1 to Hearts and then at 3-3, to write that we were rattled and looking vulnerable.

With that off the table due to our winner, and then the Ibrox club not getting their own job done, they had two options; to write the latest Bad News Chronicles and put pressure on the Sevco regime or to find a way to turn on Celtic.

I think Keith Jackson showed real imagination this morning in making the bulk of his column a deranged rant against the presenters of CelticTV. But it also showed him up, again, as a dreadful journalist, a terrible writer and a snarking hypocrite.

In lashing out against “irresponsible VAR rabble rousing” he has, as on prior occasions, abrogated his responsibilities as a journalist. That decision at the weekend was indefensible.

Instead of doing his job and asking hard questions about how a Grade One official can make such a blatantly wrong call, even with VAR to support him, Jackson wants to rant about how our former players reacted to the referee’s decision. What a joke that is.

Let me remind him of something he would rather ignore.

Turn on the radio or the TV these days, or open a national newspaper, and you cannot fail to notice the stench of Ibrox. There are so many ex-players and ex-managers of that club working in the Scottish press corps they could form their own retirement community.

Kenny Miller – was on Clyde tonight arguing against the penalty that even Bobby Madden thinks was a stonewaller – is just the latest of them, and although I’ve hardly heard a sensible word out of his mouth, he seems to be in more places than COVID.

These people do nothing but push the party line from Ibrox, no matter how absurd, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how disconnected from reality, 24/7 at the moment and they have no problem with accusing people of bias when it suits them.

Jackson is one of the leading cheerleaders for the idea that a Great Unseen Fenian Hand is at work behind the scenes at the SFA and the SPFL. For him to accuse people of stoking paranoia and fuelling fires is hypocritical at best.

No-one in Scottish journalism has been such a willing, sycophantic participant in Ibrox’s own demented campaigns against Doncaster, Maxwell and McLennan.

On top of that is his attempt – his pathetic attempt – to pretend that Ange waived aside all talk of controversy.

What he actually did was so far removed from that you wonder how far up his own backside Jackson’s head is on this particular occasion. Ange made it perfectly plain his views on the penalty. His comment about only taking them in training was a pointed reference to the reluctance of officials to award them to us.

Or did Jackson miss that? I think not. Nor is he too stupid to understand it, although that one is less cut and dried because we’re not dealing with a Quiz Kid here.

“It was difficult not to have some sympathy with the man in the middle of this magnificent mayhem at Tynecastle,” he writes.

Actually, it is difficult verging on impossible to have any sympathy for him whatsoever.

This is the Referees Protection Society at its finest, refusing to ask hard questions, refusing to acknowledge even the possibility that this decision was something other than bad judgement.

You know, I have long been of the view that when the crooks do sink their teeth into our sport – provided they aren’t at work already – it will be in no small part because idiots like Jackson refuse to even entertain the idea that something rotten might be at work.

If I wanted to fix matches, I could not think of a better environment in which to get busy and that’s because we have a media here which is either gutless or already in on the con.

Either way, this is precisely the attitude which virtually guarantees that those who have something to hide will never have anything to fear. That’s why his comments are as indefensible as the penalty decision itself, the one he pointedly refuses to scrutinise.