This morning, Keevins has published a piece which stinks even by his own standards. Which are so near the bottom of the charts that the word barely even applies. Everything I dislike about this guy is on full display. Every reason he should not be in the journalism business is made crystal clear from the first line to the last. It is abysmal.
“Meeting Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers in the street unexpectedly as I did last week is an occupational hazard for people in my line of work,” is how he opens it, and right away I felt my anger that this guy makes a living doing this creep into the red zone.
First, an “occupational hazard” is a risk you encounter in your line of work. Meeting the Celtic boss unexpectedly could happen to any of us. You do not need to consider yourself special, or work in one of those egotistical professions to accidently run into somebody in the Tesco car park. Using the phrase out of context, in such a stupid fashion, isn’t my principal concern though.
As the article makes abundantly clear, this is not a meeting Keevins could have engineered by picking the phone up. It is further proof that he wouldn’t be allowed a one-on-one if his life depended on it. Still, that wasn’t my principal concern either.
“You are obliged,” he wrote, “to race through the contents of your mind in a frantic search to remember the last you wrote or said about the man in case you might have given cause for offence and be about to bear the brunt of his anger along with whatever retribution might follow.” And right there is everything I detest about the guy, summed up.
First, what kind of journalist thinks that way? What kind of person in the profession whose job it is to scrutinise and write facts, and cover our sport, has thoughts run through his head akin to those of somebody who has been avoiding a debtor for months and accidently run into him. He sounds gutless, and I’ve long argued that’s exactly what he is.
If you’ve ever seen Succession you’ll recognise my characterisation of Keevins as being akin to Tom, the husband of Logan Roy’s daughter Shiv, who treats subordinates like shit, throwing his weight around, but who becomes a servile crawling ass-kisser the second he encounters someone higher up on the corporate ladder. That’s what Keevins reveals himself as.
He is a coward, content to throw bombs from afar but who wilts in the face of anyone who challenges him about it to his face. And something else bugs me about that statement; if he was a straight guy who did his job right, who concentrated on the facts, who wasn’t going out of his way to be controversial for its own sake he would never have any need to worry what he wrote, because it would all be fair comment. Only the shock-jocks and the shit-stirrers ever worry that they’ve upset people, although it’s exactly what they set out to do.
How dumb is Keevins? Let’s start with his ascribing great weight to a chance encounter, and drawing conclusions about Rodgers state of mind from it. Only a complete fool would do that. But move further into the article where he declares Financial Fair Play to be dead and buried. Why? Because of the Saudis and the money they are spending.
Financial Fair Play is a UEFA directive.
The Saudis don’t play in Europe, so FFP has no impact on what it is that they do. If Keevins want to know what the state of FFP looks like he can look at Chelsea, fined last week to the tune of £8 million for breaches. Or if he really wants to get into it, Juventus, whose own violations just got them a European ban and expulsion from the Europa League.
He should be sacked for turning that article in, without having the first clue about those facts. He is an embarrassment to himself, but as long as he’s getting paid for it he doesn’t care. So by dint of that, he’s an embarrassment to his profession and the newspaper which employs him. But really, journalism of this abysmal standard should be shaming, because it treats it readers like absolute fools and holds the publication up to ridicule.
I particularly liked this line; “Conclusions can’t be drawn from pre-season games, right?” Which is highly amusing considering his “Celtic in crisis” moonhowling from last weekend when he was castigating us the result of our first one.
This is a writer who doesn’t know his basic facts, who is a snivelling hypocrite and who thinks a chance encounter with a guy out with his family is the basis for an entire article, and the proof that there is some “mutual respect” between him and our manager.
He should have been put out to pasture long ago, this joker. He offers nothing to the national debate over our game. His basic ignorance is astounding. Any publication which employs him cannot be seriously considered part of that debate either.