Daily Record Hackl Twists Barkas Words To Generate An Anti-Celtic Story.

The name Mark Pirie will be a familiar one to the regular readers of this blog.

I don’t like much of what this guy produces.

Apart from everything else, he has a marked tendency to try to get stories where there are none. There is clickbait – which he does – and just Making Stuff Up, which he also does. Clickbait is bad. Passing off fiction as news is worse.

Yesterday he was at it with Vasilis Barkas, who he said made a “veiled Celtic ‘trust’ jibe”; in short, he took some comments Barkas had made in Holland, where he’s on loan, and twisted them to get an anti-Celtic story out of them.

All Barkas said is that the Dutch club “trusted him” and allowed him to rebuild his career. He talks about Celtic in the same interview and never says a bad word against us, although he does acknowledge that it was hard during COVID.

But when he talks about trust it’s clear that he’s saying he arrived there with his career on a bit of a slide, and they put their faith in him and helped him turn it around. That is not, in any way, a dig at Celtic whether veiled or otherwise.

Pirie wanted a story and has got one by basically interpreting what Barkas said in a way that creates controversy where none existed. Barkas will hopefully leave Celtic this summer.

He sounds like he’s happy in Holland, and we will all wish him well in his future.

As I’ve written here before, I want him to succeed in no small part because our media was happy to write him off as a dud and wrote some of the worst stuff about him I’ve read about any footballer to play here.

As soon as I saw the word “veiled” it was obvious what this was.

It’s a despicable tactic, the height of bad, lazy journalism and a practice which good editors would discourage. I know blogs which would not allow their writers to take liberties like that.

But our media has no standards and it is filled with people with no shame.