Ewan Murray’s Latest Anti-Celtic Rant In The Guardian Is White Noise Amidst Excellence.

In recent times, I’ve become a big fan of the football writing in The Athletic. But before that, and indeed for a long time past, I have been a fan of The Guardian’s sports team which is hands down the best in the business working on this island.

They write, there, with passion, wit and insight. If their writers have favourites, I could not tell you who they are. None of them seems to have a chip on their shoulder or an axe to grind. Some, like Jonathon Wilson, finds certain characters and situations endlessly fascinating – his pieces on Cristiano Ronaldo were superb – but they are never gratuitous.

Only one writer at that paper seems to have a permanent bee in his bonnet over one particular club; Ewan Murray, their sole Scottish correspondent.

He’s a Hearts fan, and by God does he have a problem with Celtic. His piece yesterday, which I read before the game, is exactly the sort I’ve come to expect from him; bitter, sarcastic, selective in its use of facts and generally just pretty arrogant.

“Ange Postecoglou’s VAR complaints feed familiar Old Firm biases” is the headline of his latest piece, where he accuses our manager of feeding paranoia and pursuing some kind of agenda to create headlines. He thinks that his comment about The Mooch when he was asked about his appointment, about being more interested in his dinner was petty. He reckons that Ange has reversed himself on his “ambivalence” towards VAR.

And he thinks Ange has “ignored acts of officialdom that have worked in Celtic’s favour, including since VAR’s introduction.” He follows this up with this beautiful assertion. “They do exist.”

Indeed, these “acts of officialdom” are so common and widespread that he does not cite a single example. Instead, like a Sasquatch enthusiast, he simply leaves us with a blank assertion and the task of finding our own evidence. That’s not journalism, it’s ring and run. It’s piss taking. It’s cheating. And exactly what I expect from this writer unworthy of his platform.

Amazingly, he suggested that the 38 league games in which Ibrox has failed to concede a penalty are no more than “a statistical anomaly”. Here, again, he colossally fails in his principle task as a journalist by not exploring what that stat actually represents; that’s a full season of games and not one single penalty kick. An anomaly?

Here’s the thing with anomalies; they very rarely happen twice. But we know because of Andrew Smith’s excellent piece from a week or so ago that this particular bolt of lightning has stuck before, and in the exact same place. This is the second lengthy run without conceding a penalty in the league that this Ibrox club has been on … the other lasted 44 games.

An anomaly is one-off occurrence. It’s unthinkable that Murray is not aware that this is the second time this has happened in a mere four-year period … they have conceded only four spot kicks in that time, whilst they shipped six in Europe in a ten-month spell.

He talks, though, about Ibrox’s silence lasting only as long as it takes for a bad decision to go their way. Indeed, their forums – which for weeks have been calling us paranoid are on full-scale moon howling mode today because we finally got a decision. Still, Murray makes the point – without grasping it in its full context – that in 2019 they raised 100 kinds of Hell about Willie Collum which resulted in his being excluded from their games for months.

A fact, that, but here’s what he didn’t say; they lodged their complaint with the SFA in November of that year. In December a penalty was awarded against them which was to be the last one before that 44 game run started. When they finally did get a decision against them in the league guess what they did? They complained about it.

As CQN recounted recently; “The ref who broke that 44-game run was Euan Anderson, who awarded St Johnstone a crucial late penalty (although the league was already won) and was immediately banished to the lower leagues for three weeks. He only returned to the topflight for an end-of-season St Mirren-Dundee United clash. Lesson learned; I assume.”

Oh most definitely. What a pity Murray didn’t do his homework before turning in another anti-Celtic screed full of ridiculous assertions and unsupported conclusions.