There are a handful of my readers who wish I’d stop writing about Hugh Keevins. Some have even expressed that in aggressive language. I have something to say to them; as long as it’s me running this site it will publish what I want it to.
The day Keevins puts his juddering poison pen away I’ll gladly retire the pieces. When he stops telling lies about us – and he told another one today – I will stop telling the truth about him.
Let’s deal with the lie first; he has suggested that Rodgers has expressed dissatisfaction with a section of the Celtic support. He cannot support this claim, because it’s a fiction. He doesn’t even try to. He supposes his readers are too stupid not to wonder about it.
His editors certainly let him away with it.
Yet his latest attack on Celtic is through a player. He’s targeted a few in the last few years, and with Starfelt, who he hates with a passion that suggests he has a thing for Jacynta himself, about to leave he’s now turned on Joe Hart, who he doesn’t rate. Wow.
With all his experience of management (none) or his ability to spot a player (none) he is someone we should listen to, right? Wrong.
This isn’t insight. It’s a bandwagon he’s climbing shamelessly aboard. Late as usual, we’re all here well ahead of him. Every Celtic fan I know has been talking about the need to replace Joe Hart for months. All he’s doing is trying to create a controversy where one doesn’t exist.
This is all he knows how to do. He has no skill at ferreting out information and he never has. He writes opinion pieces when his opinions are un-informed, ignorant rot.
He is focussed on next week when we travel to Aberdeen.
He’s talking up their side as a major threat to our title chances, and he’s saying we can’t afford to go there and drop anything with Ibrox looming. What’s readily apparent is that he wrote that piece in the aftermath of our game yesterday but before the Aberdeen side he lauds dropped their first points of the season, away at Livingston, without even registering a shot on target.
And, obviously that came way before the Ibrox club lost in Ayrshire. So the points he says neither side could afford to drop were dropped already when his article appeared this morning. Think of what that means. He filed his copy and then just shut down for the day.
He didn’t review his piece in light of the Aberdeen game, or the disastrous start The Mooch and his team made, and his editors did not even bother to insist on it.
That reeks. It reeks of laziness and complacency across the board. Nobody at that paper can defend that, and Keevins certainly can’t. Every assertion in that piece was out of date when it was published, not that there was much merit to it even when he sat down and wrote it.
There were articles in the paper written after the Ibrox game; Gary Keown wrote a pain-filled screech about how The Mooch could be fired by the end of September.
The arrogance of not reviewing the piece in light of changing facts and circumstances blatantly insults the small band of readers he has left. It is two fingers up to the colleagues at the paper who are willing to put in even the minimal amount of work.
And that’s the best case scenario, of course.
Because there’s another one, and it’s equally appalling, which is that Keevins was so keen to present his latest narrative of the problems facing last year’s treble winners that he decided to omit anything that interfered with that … like objective facts and the current circumstances.
That should be a sacking offence.
And in a better journalistic environment it would be.