Yesterday, the hacks sat and asked Brendan Rodgers about two of our own targets, whose names have been doing the rounds lately, the Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Reda and the Brazilian winger Ferreira; he was unequivocal in his response.
“I don’t even know them, to be honest.”
Which makes me wonder what some of this guff comes from.
The simple truth is this; our media has no idea what’s going on at Celtic or who our actual transfer targets are. And if they don’t know what’s happening here, at Parkhead, in Glasgow, right on their own doorstep, how the Hell do they know – other than sifting through internet tittle-tattle – who the Hell a club in Turkey is trying to sign?
Earlier on, I talked about this story involving Liel Abada and the speculation linking him with Fenerbahçe. It’s a classic example of a dumb transfer story going viral in spite of being largely free of a single verifiable fact.
Honestly, it’s a complete non-story and you can spot them thus; when a team is said to be “considering an offer” or “weighing up a move” that means they haven’t done a damned thing, that no actual bid has been submitted, that no actual business is in progress.
What does “considering an offer” mean? I was looking at desktop PC’s online yesterday; you could say that I was, in effect, “weighing up a bid” or “considering an offer.”
And you know what? I strongly suspect I’ll still be using this PC this time next year.
90% of this stuff goes nowhere. Unless the hack writing the story has access to internal club documents or can read minds from afar then it’s most probably speculative junk.
I love the way some of the hacks who produce this stuff are referred to as “in the know” or “well informed.”
Based on what?
Getting the odd story right, after it’s been circulating online for a month?
Answer me this; how many pieces of complete nonsense do some of these people have to publish before they lose that exalted “in the know” status?
Because from where I’m sitting every single one of them has a failure rate which would have had Jim Goodwin sacked already.
The only people “in the know” work at Celtic Park, and they ain’t talking.