The torrent of anti-Celtic stories in the press at the moment is so relentless that even I am guilty, sometimes, of missing them. Take the one about Cho Gue Sung taking a “veiled swipe” at us; well that passed me by completely until I stumbled upon it last night when I was doing my article sweep for this morning. That was by Mark Pirie.
He, of course, has previous for this, for taking what someone actually said and interpreting it however he damn well likes in order to justify an anti-Celtic headline. I read what Cho Gue Sung said upon signing for his new club in Denmark. He knows that he and his agent made a huge mistake in stalling on Celtic whilst they waited for German or French clubs to come along … his comment about how the Danes made him feel wanted certainly isn’t a dig at us; we did want him, and he kept us waiting around until we decided that was no longer tenable.
Still Pirie read into it what he wanted, and he doesn’t care that no-one at Celtic gives a damn whether Cho is happy about how things turned out or not (here’s a clue; he isn’t). Blaming us for that deal not going through is preposterous and everyone knows it.
Nowadays, whenever I read that someone has had a “veiled” dig at us I surmise, and always correctly, that this is some hack up to no good and so it was here.
There is so much of this stuff out there now that I am bound to miss some of it, and that’s how I was caught sleeping at the wheel in the case of that particular story. It just got past me amidst the tide of the stuff that we have to deal with every day.
Last night I wrote about the latest nonsense; this story that our fans were “split” over that bounce game that was played yesterday in Portugal and was of such low importance that the club hasn’t even bothered to issue a score-line on it. Why would they?
As I said, neither club advertised the game in advance, it wasn’t streamed (except by one guy on his phone) and was really not about anything but giving people a chance to get fit.
But even before the article about the divide in our supporters over the handful of fans who turned up to the training centre hoping to see a match, The Record had already been at it by claiming that the “Rodgers return” game had been snubbed by broadcasters. I mean, Jesus … were they expecting it to be shown live on BT Sport? A glorified training exercise?
“Portimonense vs Celtic faces TV and live stream blackout as first game of Brendan Rodgers second coming skipped” screamed the headline over Pirie’s second dire piece in the space of two days, another attempt to just generate an anti-Celtic headline out of thin air. I’ve been doing this job for over a decade; I cannot remember a summer so full of this.
The same newspaper this morning has a headline acclaiming The Mooch as “a tactical genius.” That’ll be how he lost both cup matches to Celtic last season, right? I just wonder that they never get tired of the embarrassment of running this stuff day after day.
Now this morning it’s the “injury blow” to Alastair Johnston; we don’t know whether he is actually going to be out for the start of the season or not, or what sort of injury he has, but the media is off the races with the torrent of negativity. He “may” miss crucial games is their line … with the emphasis on “may” and you can hear the prayers being muttered.
Now, he may well have an injury which keeps him out for some games, but honestly, the media just loves this stuff right now. It is the worst close season in living memory for this sort of nonsensical negativity. I take solace from knowing it’s the product of fear.