Alex McLeish Was A Key Figure In Cheating Our Club. He Should Stay Silent.

The papers this morning are full of the rantings and ravings of a dyed in the wool nutter. Why is Alex McLeish a nutter? His deranged meltdown at Martin O’Neill is the kind of thing only a nutter would produce, the kind of nutter who believed he really was, whilst at Ibrox, on the brink of signing Lionel Messi based on the recommendation of Football Manager.

McLeish is not ever going to be on a list of my most favourite people. That he was twice Scotland boss is an insult to this country and he set the game back years in that disastrous second tenure. He’s one of those people most in the game wish would just go away, and he can’t resist chipping in, every now and again, on the big debates just to remind us he’s still here.

Martin O’Neill has just published his latest book. He feels uniquely qualified to jump into the VAR and refereeing debate, in particular as so many are keen to tell us that Celtic managers of old didn’t feel like officials were against them.

That will be news to almost all of the managers of our modern era. Lennon and Deila both knew it for a fact. Martin O’Neill knew it too. He knew it as well as anyone has ever known it and in talking about that notorious League Cup Final he was right to highlight the Hartson “offside goal” as one of the most appalling decisions ever made in the fixture.

McLeish shot back about Hartson missing the late penalty. Just because we got that decision, should we never bring up the one we didn’t get? McLeish is at it with this, and attacking O’Neill simply because he decided to speak on this subject is pitiful attention seeking stuff.

“Martin’s foray into an alleged carve-up by Scottish refs and VAR to deny his old club a penalty in the last Old Firm match was bizarre,” he said. But what was bizarre about it? Martin O’Neill didn’t simpy dive into this. He was asked a question and answered it.

“When we managed the Old Firm, I also thought Rangers were denied decisions by referees. So if Rangers and Celtic weren’t getting decisions, who was? Games often ended with us feeling aggrieved. But we’d never head down the conspiracy rabbit hole, never,” McLeish went on, conveniently forgetting a few salient details.

The first of which was this; his club was, at that time, cheating the rest of Scottish football by using the EBT’s. That’s an inconvenient truth he never likes to be reminded of, and he knew full well what was going on. The “conspiracy rabbit hole” he talks about turned out to be a vast underground chamber full of secrets, many of which were known inside Hampden as his colleagues at Ibrox, including one of their directors, was in a senior position there.

So of course they never screamed conspiracy. You don’t draw attention to conspiracies when you’re an active part of one. His period at that club was the one where the use of tax evasion for the purposes of winning matches was at its height and that particular League Cup was only one of several trophies which should have been taken away from them for it.

All McLeish does when he sticks his nose into these matters is serves to remind us all of what he and everyone else at that club were up to their necks in, and they weren’t alone because a lot of people at Hampden were right in it with them.

He is an attention seeking joker. If I was in his shoes, with his prominent involvement in the greatest sporting scandal in the history of this island, I would keep my head down. He’s too stupid for that which is why over the course of today all of Celtic social media will remind him of just how deep that rabbit hole went and what was at the bottom of it.