Smirking McCoist Is Closer To The Mark Than He Intends With His Celtic VAR Snark.

Here’s the problem with being sharp, but essentially stupid.

Sometimes you are so on it that you grab the wrong end of the blade with your hands.

That’s what the smirking fool McCoist has done tonight in his efforts to be humorous at our expense.

I can take a joke.

But the idea that we’re all paranoid is starting to grate on me, especially coming from the guy who sat in front of the media once waving blank sheets of paper and pretending to have devastating information, and used that to try and put nameless SFA officials in the firing line because they were out to get his club.

Wasn’t that genuine paranoia?

It had it all, right down to the foaming at the mouth.

It was the act of reprehensible bastard, not the guy who is treated by some as a darling of the commentary circuit.

This is the same guy who darkly hinted that Celtic fans might have burned an Ibrox team bus, without a shred of evidence and at a time when some of us openly said it was a professional job and not a random crime or act of spite.

Not surprisingly, no-one has ever been arrested for it far less charged and convicted. About you’d expect from professionals, not so much from nutty amateurs striking a blow against a football club.

On the other hand, McCoist’s open entreaty to the lunatic fringe at Ibrox over those SFA names did in fact lead to one of the people being outed and his club – Raith Rovers – and their director, Eric Drysdale, getting death threats and talk of their ground being burned down. There was definitely a footballing agenda behind that.

I’m just putting that out there. I’m just saying that if I’m going to be accused of being paranoid, and even mocked for that, I would prefer it was not done by someone who has demonstrated all the worst traits of that particular disorder, ranted maniacally, whipped up a hate mob and didn’t particularly care if there was collateral damage or not.

His latest snark at us – talk about keeping a story current – is to suggest that the SFA’s next VAR panel should consist of Chris Sutton, Jason Bourne and Rod Stewart. Maybe the Jason Bourne reference has a meaning I’m unfamiliar with but it shows a fundamental lack of imagination just the same. He could have gone with any number of better examples.

(And maybe this hasn’t dawned on him; Bourne wasn’t paranoid. They really were out to get him.)

Like I said, sharp but ultimately stupid. And this time he’s grabbed the blade.

Because of course, this is our point. This makes our point for us.

Our point is that you want honest people behind those monitors.

If a panel were to be suggested and it contained nothing but people with a connection to Celtic this clown would be back ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth and demanding to know how that happened.

If you sat him down, gave him a shot of something to calm him down, and then said to him “Officials are not biased, and it doesn’t matter what team they support, they will be completely impartial …” you would hear the renewed screaming at Hampden.

Nobody would believe that such people would act as neutrals. Nobody. Least of all this eejit.

So why, when we point that out, are we paranoid?

Our entire case is built around the idea that those who have clear allegiances shouldn’t be officiating certain clubs. We would no more want a panel like that than we would one made up of a BBC Sports Scotland select.

We’re not calling for any advantage here, that’s not what this is about and you have to be pretty stupid or fundamentally dishonest to characterise our demands in that way.

Kris Boyd is a case in point; both idiotic and biased to the core, so no wonder his own pitiful snark was “why don’t we just let Celtic win everything?” As if that’s what this is about.

But we’re not trying to stack the deck in our favour, we just want to make sure that nobody is base dealing. If McCoist wants to have the debate, then let’s have it.

If he wants those panels made up of “good men and true” then by God so do we.

This is not a joke.

That so many are determined to make it one makes me wonder again why they are so scared of having a real discussion over it.