Demented Anti-Celtic Hack Has A Meltdown And Misses The Point On Our VAR Complaints.

There are very few times when I will write an article based on second half information that I haven’t been able to verify, but a good friend of mine asked me if I’d seen Gary Keown’s latest piece. I laughed at the very idea. Why would I, after all?

I’ll be honest; I still haven’t. It’s available only in the print edition of the rag he writes for and I have no intention of paying actual money to read the scribblings of that eejit, a complete muppet who not that long ago was branding Kyogo a cheat and has dissed every Celtic manager of the modern age one way or the other. He’s a joke.

Still, my mate assured me that it a masterpiece of rage and paranoia in which he accuses Celtic of putting pressure on refs and officials, a campaign which he says has paid off in recent weeks. I have no reason to disbelieve that this is the general tone of the article. Indeed, I am not even slightly surprised by it. This is the kind of poison I expect from his pen.

But of course, the central thesis of his piece is complete bollocks because we’re not seeking special favours or special status or any of that crap, as he appears to be suggesting. This is typical of the idiots who write for the press here in Scotland; high school paper rejects for the most part, who either write through bias or don’t think things through.

What do we need special favours for?

What do we need additional assistance for? We didn’t need help to put four past Kilmarnock at Hampden, even if only two of them counted. We would have been Morton comfortably at home without the aid of a penalty.

We had terrible decisions go against us for months, and we kept getting results anyway.

Anyone who believes that we’re trying to bend officials to our will, and make them give us decisions, isn’t right in the head, and for a journalist to suggest such a thing is ridiculous.

They have a cheek to accuse fans of indulging in paranoia when they write stuff like this.

All Celtic wants is a level playing field. You know why we want to remove bias and/or incompetence from the equation here? Why we want shot of the “Honest Mistakes”? Because on a level playing field we’ll win, because on a level playing field the only thing that counts is the quality we have versus what the opposition can muster.

Our club has asked for explanations for some outrageous decisions.

We’re not demanding to be the beneficiaries of equally outrageous ones.

The penalty at the weekend was not even close to being a good decision, but I firmly believe it would have been given against us and half of the people banging the drum over it wouldn’t have cracked a light.

Celtic has as much right to ask for clarification on these decisions as any club, and that doesn’t mean that we are seeking special treatment. Our club does not want it nor need it, because to be blunt we’re better off for never having been the establishment club, for never have been at the centre of a little web of protectionism and bias … everything we’ve had we’ve had to earn and the one advantage of that is that it makes you stronger and better.

And in the end that’s what Keown’s real problem is. Not with a handful of decisions which have recently gone our way but that we’ve never needed them to win, and we don’t now.