The Media Has Forgotten Who We Play Tomorrow. Fortunately No-One At Celtic Has.

Of all the press conferences our manager has had to endure lately, I think today’s might have been the worst. It wasn’t even that he had to put up with inane nonsense which had nothing to do with the game tomorrow, it was that Carter Vickers was subjected to the same and the overall impact was to make it a colossal waste of everyone’s time.

Our media simply did not want to focus on the game at hand. They tried, several times and in several different ways, to get both Ange and Carter Vickers talking about other things, Ibrox-related things for the most part, which neither was interested in doing.

The cup final is next week. We play Aberdeen tomorrow. The media seems to have completely and utterly forgotten that, or chose today to ignore it. Fortunately, Ange and the players know where their own focus has to be and as per usual kept it there.

Their frustration was obvious, but so too was their desire to keep the discussion where it belonged, on maintaining our nine point lead by playing, and beating, Aberdeen. Nothing else matters at this moment in time. Once tomorrow is over with, we can focus on the final and then maybe some of these ridiculous questions will seem sensible.

But honestly, I’m certain these guys have never sat in front of people like these in their lives, people so unprofessional, people so obsessed with small matters and gossip. When our manager gets in front of these people he wants to discuss the games themselves, and in particular the one directly in front of him, as he’s supposed to do.

And yet I have never seen a Celtic boss asked questions of such irrelevance to his job. The press thinks sometimes that he’s being funny, but I see a guy who is growing very weary, and even a little bit contemptuous of them and that’s bad for them and bad for us because we want to hear the manager talk about stuff like Kyogo’s injury status and how the players are feeling as they go into a critical spell … and he can’t do that if he’s fighting through this garbage.

You know, Keith Jackson bitched and wailed and moaned on Monday about Ange missing one press conference, and acted like some sort of guy left standing at the bar waiting on a date who never showed up. I thought it was a petty little article and said so.

Well, today he should look to his colleagues a bit more and the way they behave; that was exactly the sort of press conference which makes managers not want to sit in front of the media, and I think the boss is getting fed up with it and maybe that’s the plan behind it.

Some of them have done everything else to promote the idea that he should be on the first plane to England, maybe this is how they plan to sicken him of our game up here. It has worked, after all, for the bulk of their readers.