The week only started yesterday, but I genuinely believe we already have the worst story of this seven day period, and of course it’s a piece of Ibrox ass-kissing of a truly astonishing degree, the sort of article that you cannot help but marvel at and then laugh at and then marvel at again that a national title ever bothered to run it.
Would you look at this:
That refers to go a goal this guy scored in training. Yeah, a kick-about in training, which when you watch these guys is sort of the equivalent of playing football with your kids in the park and where every out of shape dad tries tricks like he’s Messi.
Celtic fans are openly mocking this on Twitter, as you would expect, as it richly deserves.
The article itself is a collection of comments from fans getting carried away with themselves at what it is the sort of training pitch moment managers and coaches and other players see every single day of the week and which means exactly nothing in the real world.
Fans getting over-excited – and especially their fans – is something that you can see every day of the week on forums and social media. The Ibrox supporters are about as delusional and deluded as they come and they are better left in their own wee world … it’s that a national title thinks this is a story, it’s that they actually gushed over it, that amazes me.
This is the descent of the mainstream media, something I was discussing on the Spiers podcast the other day, to where the press now chases cheap clicks instead of telling actual stories.
I mean, I have to do a fuller piece on that at some stage because to a certain extent I feel a bit of sympathy for the people who feel that they have to write that stuff … but only to a point. I’m in the same game as them and if a Celtic player did that in training I certainly wouldn’t be writing about it as if he’d done it in a Champions League game, if I bothered about it at all.
Because, of course, there’s another element to this; this is about a bit of Ibrox feel-good as well. Some of their smarter fans are refusing to get carried away.
They look at Lammers’ record and it’s terrible, it’s totally unconvincing, and so part of it is doing a sales job on this guy’s behalf and trying to get him some positive spin before the season starts.
(At which point it will be too late for them to hide it if he’s as bad as the stats suggest.)
I wrote last night about the overdose of hype their club is being pumped up with and it continues to amaze me that they do this to themselves when, instead, they can play it cool and professional and simply get on with their preparations as Celtic do.
Why set themselves up for the almighty fall which will be waiting for them on the other side of the summer?
Lammers “looks like a class act” some of them are gushing, on the strength of that. Ridiculous headlines scream questions about whether he’s “our own Thierry Henry” … and a so-called serious journalist is lapping that up.
I mean good God. Standards? Anyone?
You can check out Graham’s podcast at this link.