Keith Jackson Either Doesn’t Understand The Celtic Boss Or Just Misrepresents Him.

I have a confession to make; I didn’t read Keith Jackson’s Monday column until very late last night.

I know, right? Shame on me.

Required reading every week, yeah?

Actually, no.

Usually I don’t bother until someone flags something in it. This week nobody did.

So I would have missed it except that I was bored and went looking for amusement.

I found the story itself pretty inane.

It was about how Ange has a point about the Goldson decision, but that the point was hidden and coded and that it needed a man of his own genius to decode it for us.

Of course, his effort was pitiful.

For something that was supposed to be revelatory it really wasn’t.

He said when Ange made the point about how the Goldson incident would have been covered differently had it happened at the other end of the pitch he was saying that a story about a title deciding call would have run for weeks.

Well wow.

Does he want the Alan Turing Award for codebreaking or what?

Ange says it exactly like that. Did Jackson sit up all night trying to work this out?

Read his boastful insight exactly as he wrote it. What a genius!

“When you listen carefully to what he was actually saying, there was a significant message buried somewhere in there – and one with which it’s difficult to disagree. Postecoglou’s point was not that Scotland’s officials are bending over backwards in a concerted effort to do favours for (Ibrox). He’s bigger and better than that. Rather, he was attempting to explain that all hell would most likely have broken loose had the Ibrox side been on the receiving end of such a controversial decision at the other end of the pitch. Not because they’re (from Ibrox). But because that one isolated incident could have been held up as a potentially ‘title defining’ moment had it prevented the chasers from taking a sizable chunk out of the gap at the top of the table.”

Incredible isn’t it?

He worked out that the hidden meaning in Ange’s words was that … he meant them exactly as he said them.

What an idiot this guy is.

You can tell that there’s no formal education propping this joker up can’t you?

The thing is, that ridiculous attempt overlooks the real meaning.

He says Ange isn’t suggesting that there’s a concerted effort against us.

Of course he isn’t.

He’s too smart to say any such thing, because that would get him dragged up before the beaks and sanctioned for it and he isn’t going to give them what some of them clearly want.

But that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t dropped some pretty big hints.

Ange talked about how the decisions won’t even themselves out.

He’s been clear that the bad decisions have only gone one way.

He’s having a dig at the way the media covers these things, and in particular how it covers our so-called paranoia.

Jackson can wilfully ignore the obvious, clear, dig at the media which is present in his words about how a decision going the opposite way would have created a firestorm, but we all know exactly what Ange meant.

Jackson’s article veers all over the map. At one stage he writes this priceless paragraph.

“At various times, mostly over the last decade or so, (the Ibrox club) have acted like a paranoid wreck of a football club – jabbing all manner of accusatory fingers at individual match officials and even at entire governing bodies. They’ve churned out a catalogue of rambling, mean spirited statements and launched one legal action after the other while convincing themselves the whole world is out to get them.”

What a hoot that is!

Because although I could have written that paragraph myself (with a little more finesse, though) Jackson trumpeted and parroted almost every single one of those moon-howling statements and even wrote entire articles about how the club was “onto something” when they were throwing about dodgy dossiers.

He is one of the premier pushers of the drug we call The Victim Lie, the idea that Scottish football conspired – there it is! The magic word! – to “relegate” the club who played there.

He thinks we’re all as stupid as he is, but some of us remember.

And some of us keep extensive archives.

If he wants I can lay some of it out for him and embarrass him properly.

It’s all available online anyway.

I think Jackson either fundamentally misunderstood what our manager was saying in part because he’s thick and in part because he disappeared down a rabbit hole of his own trying to interpret it, or he’s simply misrepresenting what he knows full well Ange was actually saying.

I think it’s probably more than that the other … I think it’s a particularly spineless piece where he thinks he can twist Ange’s words into the version he wants so that he can essentially agree with it whilst sneering at the rest of us.

In short, it was vintage Jackson.

Put another way, another utterly contemptable charade.