The Media’s New Tactic For Unsettling Celtic’s Players Is Utterly Despicable And Stupid.

It took them a while, but the hacks have stumbled onto something now.

They have landed on their tactic for attempting to unsettle players who are delighted to be playing at Celtic Park. They are focussing on those who haven’t been selected for the international teams and they are blaming it on the standard of the SPFL.

It is a shocking tactic.

This is like scorched earth stuff.

Are they so desperate to see players leave our club that they are willing to torch the game here?

Some of it is subtle, like the report yesterday about how Giakoumakis has been capped again now he’s no longer at Celtic; you’d think that he had been dropped from the Greek team for the whole of last year … that’s not the case at all as anyone who has followed international football knows well.

When the story about the Japanese players broke yesterday the media could not wait to splash it everywhere that the Japanese coach had complained about the standard of the league.

Yet he selected Maeda.

His comments were far more nuanced that our media wanted to report, but that was beside the point. It was the relish some of them had in reporting it that stuck in my craw, above and beyond what I wrote about the decision itself.

The same glee was on display when Carter Vickers wasn’t selected.

But Tillman wasn’t either, and that’s a far bigger problem for Ibrox than big Cameron’s exclusion is for us.

We’ve got Carter Vickers tied down on a long term deal.

They are trying to convince Tillman to sign.

If they are suggesting that playing in Scotland is death to your international prospects then what kind of message is that sending out to any player who a club wants to bring here?

That’s what I mean when I say this is scorched earth stuff.

These people have spent so long talking our game down that they probably aren’t even conscious of the damage they have done to it in the process, but this one should be obvious even for them.

There is no way to limit the damage to Celtic. They are harming every club in the country with this garbage. Do they even care about that? They will if it impacts Ibrox, and it very well might.