Imagine Celtic Caught Up In What’s Happening At Ibrox. Would The Media Be Silent?

“Rangers issue 3 million new shares as Ibrox club create cash boost opportunity” was the headline in The Daily Record last night, and Mark Pirie’s article reflected it. The press does not see anything out of the ordinary in what that lot are doing over there.

But of course, everything across there is in a state of flux and maybe the reason that’s not being reflected in the media is that the club across there is so constantly embroiled in some form of crisis that it’s taken on a kind of normalcy, like the frog sat in a pot of cold water which is slowly heated to the boil. You get frog soup with that. At Ibrox you get a dead club.

The way the media constantly ignores that reality is astonishing.

Celtic is a club which has been run properly for years, and every single time we have a fissure between the boardroom and the coaches or a player wants away or the fans are unhappy with something it generates a mountain of media negativity.

At Ibrox they can be mired in scandal and up to their nuts in debt and nobody in the press corps cracks a light. This isn’t really about the normalisation of crisis. It is about the media not wanting to acknowledge it at all. Yet it exists whatever they write.

In the last few weeks they have lost their chairman and their director of football. They have issued two separate tranches of equity confetti.

You cannot look at that and believe that things are all good over there.

They have key players walking out on freedom of contract in a few weeks and the manager claims they didn’t even offer them anything to change their minds. In the meantime, the final version of the accounts suggests that all the money they made from the sales of their players last season has already been spent … leaving very little for the manager to spend.

What does it all add up to? If even one of these things had just happened at Celtic, they would be pulling apart the meaning of it and trying to ascertain what else is going on. Yet we appear to be the only ones with a mounting sense that things over there are disintegrating prior to a summer in which the manager has demanded – and expects – to be backed.

The two guys who would have been responsible for signing off on that – Park and Wilson – have gone.

Did you hear what The Mooch said about Wilson’s departure? “I have lost a key ally.” Does that suggest there are enemies at Ibrox too? That the place is divided into camps? Who talks like that? That’s not a common phrase to use unless he feels he’s meeting resistance. Yet nobody in the press has raised the question of whether that’s a healthy place for them to be.

Celtic players can give the most innocuous statements and the media has them ripped apart looking for coded meanings. Yet The Mooch says something that seems so clear-cut and direct and nobody wants to know what it means?

Keith Jackson, who actually has a decent record of asking questions about the Ibrox board – he cares about his club, it’s what you would expect – devoted his entire column on Monday to breaking down the crisis at Hearts … he claims there are big revelations to come out at that club. How can he know that and not know what’s happening right on his doorstep?

Does he really think everything at Ibrox is hunky-dory? How come he has completely failed to see anything suspect in The Mooch’s talk about allies? We know people inside the club were working against one another not that long ago – he wrote about it. Are we really expected to believe they are all pulling in the same direction now? After two high profile departures, one of whom was closer to the manager than anyone else in the building?

He’s either very stupid or he thinks that his readers are. Whatever is going on at Hearts is not nearly as big a deal as what is evidently happening at Ibrox. All we can do from here is look for patterns and try to join the dots. He can talk to people on the inside … and there is very evidently a big, big problem over there and serious questions about the summer.

It bears repeating. There would not be this silence if any of this was happening at Celtic Park. The media would never have allowed equity confetti to become normalised; they would have called it out as a sign of a distressed company. If two key figures had walked out of the club within weeks of each other, even as people on the outside are agitating for a coup the whole of the media would be asking who was now pulling the strings over there and how close things were to civil war.

Instead we get puff-pieces on how the latest “share issue” is some kind of cash bonus.

Who exactly is a story like that for? It’s not just spin, it is flat-out dishonesty and it not fooling any of us … is it for the Ibrox fans? I’ve said before that this kind of stuff actually brings no benefit to the club, although it’s clearly spin on their behalf. It keeps fans from the full facts and an understanding of things in their proper context.

But it might also have an impact on season ticket sales, so of course that can’t happen. Nothing would plunge them deeper into whatever crisis is swallowing them up over there at the current time. This is why the press is throwing softballs.

They might as well just go back to paying Ibrox for access again. They aren’t journalists as long as they live in that club’s pocket.