It is possible, I think, at times, to do this job too much, to focus too much time and energy on it to the detriment of other things. I usually know when I’ve spent too long on here when I start to wonder if I’m perhaps become a little paranoid and bitter and angry and seeing things in the mainstream media which might not really be there.
At times I read something and wonder if my own perception of it is going to jive with everyone else’s. When I read the story last night about Kyogo Furuhashi having dealt Brendan Rodgers an “injury blow” and about him having an operation which would keep him out for the start of the campaign I wondered if this was one of those times when I’d simply had a long day and was feeling a little bit under the weather; in short, I wondered if I might be over-reacting.
Not that I really believed that. Because to my mind – exhausted and fed up as I was feeling last night – it seemed fairly obvious that The Daily Record had twisted the manager’s words and basically generated their own version of the story, which was that Brendan Rodgers had briefed the media that Kyogo has been carrying a shoulder injury for a while, to get as dramatic an anti-Celtic headline as they possibly could. I thought it was taking the piss.
How gratifying it was to wake up this morning and check the news sites to find that several of my colleagues and friends in Celtic cyberspace had written of their own disgust and anger at reading that story last night, and believing that it misrepresented the facts.
Brendan Rodgers did not say that Kyogo was going off to have an operation, he said that the player would probably need one at some point, not that it was happening right now.
There was nothing in that story to suggest that the player would miss the start of the season; Brendan said that Kyogo will decide when the best time to do it is.
Now, it might be that he does decide that he need that op imminently and that he might miss games, but neither he nor the manager has made that decision yet, and so there was nothing in Brendan Rodgers comments which remotely justified the interpretation The Daily Record put on his comments. That paper is a flat-out disgrace.
This is a classic example of them taking the manager’s words and basically inventing their own version of them. This is not reporting the news, it is manufacturing it, and I was so glad this morning to get up and read that other people had seen it in the same way I had.
I am not losing my mind just yet. Creeping up on it maybe – it’s been a long close season, eah? – but I am not yet all the way there, and that is good to know.