Celtic’s Young Loanee Could Have Been Seriously Injured But Halliday Says “No Red Card.”

Callum Davidson was no less angry yesterday than he was leaving Ibrox on Saturday night, where some of the decisions would have been called inexplicable if we didn’t understand them as well as we do.

The numbers don’t lie. No penalty against their club at home since September 2019, and that says it all folks. I’ll say it again, the numbers don’t lie.

In the aftermath of the weekend, almost every commentator and pundit and expert was broadly agreed on three things. First, the penalty kick was a shocker. Secondly, the red card is worse. Third and finally, Ryan Jack was a very lucky player.

Callum Davidson had a slightly different take on the same subject; he thinks that our young star, on loan at St Johnstone, Adam Montgomery, who was the player on the end of that vicious high lunge, is also very lucky. ““It was very lucky Adam wasn’t hurt,” he said. “It was the type of tackle they have been trying to outlaw for the last four or five years.”

How the media outlets must have searched high and low for someone to defend that shocker. Or maybe not. Not when so many of them have Andy Halliday on speed-dial. And of course, he’s capable of giving an unbiased, honest opinion right?

Haha. Yeah, I laughed writing that as well.

He tries to dress up his defence of that thuggish action by taking Nicky Clark’s side as well of course, and insisting that neither deserved the red. Which is just as transparent a strategy as the one which was adopted by David Martindale yesterday when he said he meant no disrespect to Celtic before he doled out ladles of it.

Of course Clark’s wasn’t a red card, and only two people on the planet thought that it was; the match official and his buddy in the VAR room. If you listened to The Mooch after the game, he pretty much accepted it himself.

So Halliday telling us what everyone knows to be a fact doesn’t let him off the hook when he devolves into pro-Ibrox drum banging, which is exactly all that he’s doing here. And he’s entitled to do that if that’s what he wants, but the press pretending that he is offering up some kind of neutral perspective is frankly insulting.

Our own club is entitled to be a little bit miffed here as well, because Adam Montgomery is our player and if he had gotten a serious injury that would be an issue for us.

To allow a tackle like that, and to refuse to send Jack off … it’s a nonsense, it’s a disgraceful decision which Callum Davidson is rightly up in arms about, and Halliday just proves, in defending it, that he has a basic incapacity for media related work; he cannot maintain objectivity.

But then, along with that and his prior Ibrox career, he can probably look forward to a gig at the BBC when his player career ends. You wait and see. It’s a certainty.