If A Celtic Signing Had Lied About His Fitness, The Media Would Be Evicerating Us.

Yesterday I read John Souttar’s comments about how he lied to the Ibrox medical team about his health with incredulity. Two separate questions were raised by that confession and the media isn’t bothering with either of them.

First, what in God’s name was he thinking? And secondly, did their medical team really just take his word for it and not identify any underlying issues themselves?

Who does the medicals over there, Stevie Wonder? It’s a ridiculous situation.

I know there have been cuts at Ibrox.

But are they really so lax and so underfunded that something like this got by them because a player said he was feeling okay?

This guy didn’t sign for them with a completely injury free past; the Celtic sites all charted his injury issues and knew full well what a risk that signing was. If they didn’t do their due diligence more fool them.

Celtic would be crucified by the press if we made a mistake like this. The media would be all over us, and they would be looking at our record as a whole. Which would stand up. But across the city they have numerous players out with long-term conditions and that’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern which has roots and perhaps we’ve seen what they are.

The story isn’t that John Souttar lied about his fitness, it’s that doing so was enough to get them to put a contract in front of him. I cannot believe that they simply accepted that, that they didn’t consider his history and put him through the most rigorous set of tests imaginable. They should have been able to map any condition serious enough to lie about … and they missed it completely.

That’s the story here. That’s the one the media is oddly reluctant to write, and it should trouble the fans at Ibrox as it would trouble us if we heard such a thing.

It also casts a dark shadow over the player, of course, because a lie like that is probably grounds for their tearing his contract up and it’s an admission that would make it hard for him to get a deal elsewhere.

They are a mess over there, and this is just another sign of the dysfunctionality which is rampant at every level of that football club. Celtic would be getting hammered in these circumstances and if the media was not doing it then we would be.