Carl Starfelt Was Almost Another Victim Of The Anti-Celtic Press. Now He’s In La Liga.

You have to get our media credit. When they get it wrong they do it better than virtually anybody. How many of them have spent the past few months telling us that Carl Starfelt just wasn’t up to much, that he was too dangerous to have on the pitch? It seems that the professional scouts of Celta Vigo disagree, as do those from clubs across Europe.

Because Carl Starfelt was a wanted man.

But how can that be so? How can he possibly have been a wanted man when he was a “bombscare player” as Hugh Keevins called him? How can Starfelt possible be considered good enough for one of the top leagues in Europe when we were told that he might be a player who cost us the league title right here in Scotland?

The media in this country never holds itself to account.

Very few of its writers are prepared to admit it when they get something wrong. They flap and obfuscate, or they simply ignore their mistakes and hope that the rest of us will forget they ever made them. Except that some of them aren’t mistakes, of course, but a very deliberate strategy to undermine Celtic.

They have, for example, a habit of insisting that Ibrox flops just ned time to settle in whilst demanding that Celtic players do so immediately. They have wrecked the Celtic careers of at least two players in recent years; Bolingoli and Barkas.

I know some of our fans were unconvinced by these guys, but what they were subjected to by our media was absolutely appalling, and having done it two seasons in a row they were determined to do it for a third.

Starfelt was the one member of the Ange Postecoglou side which they thought they could easily undermine, and they believed that turning on him would get the fans to do the same. And some of them did. But the bloggers as a whole, we can take a good deal of credit, I think, from not falling into that trap and for defending big Carl and having his back.

He rewarded us by forming an excellent partnership with Cameron Carter Vickers, and I am sad to see him go. Still, some in the media only want to highlight his mistakes; I’ve seen defenders in top flight leagues, including the one south of the border, who were much more prone to serious errors than he was. One of them, Harry Maguire, is a regular for England.

Big Carl is considered, by professionals, to be good enough to play in La Liga.

This must stump those who didn’t see a player there, but all it does is reveals their ignorance. I am pleased for him, but not for us as we now have to replace the big man.

But he leaves Celtic with the good wishes of every fan, and if he’s laughing like Hell over some of his early coverage at the hands of our hacks, well I don’t blame him for that one bit.