Celtic’s Champions League Form Is Dire But Some Hacks Have Gone Way Too Far.

The media yesterday would have been unbearable had I been in the least bit interested in what most of the outlets had to say. Being far from home I was able to almost completely avoid all of it, but this morning I was cursed with the Stephen McGowan piece, and a host of other articles which only served to piss me off.

A lot of what’s in there is in what I’ve written in the past few days. But a lot of what’s in there is the same old garbage Celtic bashing by salivating hacks who clearly look forward to Champions League week even more than we do.

This has become the only sport they can get any pleasure from. They love it. They love it because it gives them a chance to whip us, and if the Ibrox side beats its third rate opponent later on today they will draw a contrast between the fortunes of our team and theirs, as though we were not playing on a vastly larger stage and much better opposition.

They choose to ignore the worst record in Champions League Group Stage history, set by Ibrox, last season’; six games, no points and a horrific goal difference column. The only reason Ibrox isn’t being judged according to the same harsh standards as us is because they were thrashed in Holland and thus didn’t even make it this far. They are sneering at us from a place of their own embarrassment and so dismissing their trailer trash view on this is easy to do.

Even easier to dismiss is the view from England, and especially this garbage some of their media are running about being “the first British club to go 15 games without a win.” I guess that we were the first British club to win the damned thing has been forgotten somewhere along the line, and anyway what does that number mean? Break it down.

We’ve played five games in the Groups this season and six last season;; there’s eleven of the games right there, so you’re going back to the campaign before that, when Rodgers was last here, to complete the set. It’s not even three campaigns. It’s a bit of a one, a whole one and a bit of another one. But they love their stat crunching especially if its bad for us.

Who exactly are we being judged against here? Ibrox? Don’t make me laugh. If they’d even made it this far they’d be facing their own embarrassing number before long. The media here is pathetic. The Scottish press shouldn’t be promoting this EPL centric guff, because that’s what it is. They are not sneering at Celtic but at Scottish football as a whole.

No Premiership club will ever have a run as bad as that, because they are amongst the wealthiest clubs on the planet. Its easy for them to sneer at Celtic due to an accident of geography that makes their league rich and ours poor. Give us the resources even of the club which finished bottom of that bloated championship last season and we’ll show all of Europe a thing or two and prove ourselves a bigger club than almost any of them.

The current holders owe nothing to development or steady club building; they are an artificial construct, nowhere at all without the gazillions at the finger tips of a planet strangling oligarchy. Newcastle – whose performance thus far has been dire – are another toy for the petro-giants to play with, and whatever success their club has in years to come will be tainted by association with those people and worse; utterly divorced from the realities of representing a working class city and fan-base which even if it had nothing else at least had a club with a soul.

The whole league floats on an ocean of TV money which has driven up prices and fees and wages all across the game. The EPL has tainted football. How dare its apologists and dogsbodies snigger at Celtic just because we’re on the wrong side of this crooked table. That’s bad enough. But for our media to play the part of willing fools in this charade is worse.

I am starting to hate The Champions League, and all the more so because our club talks a good game and milks it for all its worth but has not the slightest interest in even trying to take us from Pot 4 to Pot 3 far less further than that.

I read yesterday that the prices we charge away fans in this tournament are the highest in the competition alongside the club across town; that’s laughable when you consider that our club quite clearly does not care about progress in it.

For all that, the likes of McGowan piss me off because they speak with confidence about things about which they are clearly painfully ignorant. His article contains the ludicrous assertion that we are not equipped to finish highly enough in next year’s competition to even have a chance at football beyond the Groups; he clearly written that without giving a second’s thought to how next season’s tournament works, or he just wants to swing the boot as hard as he can.

I’ve long thought McGowan a moron. He was Lawwell’s pet for a long time and couldn’t write enough good stuff about us. Now that he’s out in the cold he acts like a spiteful ex who isn’t merely content with slashing your tyres but shares your personal messages all over Facebook and threatens to send someone round to attack your new partner.

If we finish in the top eight we’re in the knockout round. If we finish in a position between 9-24 we have to play a play-off to see if we get there; McGowan isn’t saying that we’re not going to get through the knock-outs but that we won’t even see that stage; he envisions us in one of those remaining spots from 25-36.

And that is nonsense. If we finish in one of those spots heads should roll right across the club. There will be four pots of nine teams, all seeded. We will be drawn against two sides from each pot. We surely must be good enough to get results against our fellow Pot 4 teams and even some of those in Pot 3. Because we play one team at home and one away from each pot it is surely not daft to expect to finish mid-table anyway … McGowan’s comments are ridiculous.

But the sport right now is kicking Celtic and he and others are lining up to do it.

They have no idea whether this team will be stronger or better, whether we’ll have injuries, arrivals or departures. Even a clown like McGowan must know that making predictions like this, far from the line, far from the reality, when anyone who has watched us knows with a little bit of luck we’d have taken more points in this group, is surely not expecting to be taken any more seriously than the likes of Hugh Keevins, who he more and more reminds me of.

Obviously I’m away right now guys, so if you have a comment in moderation rest assured it is not in the bin and all of them will be up as soon as I’m home. Apologies for the delay and for any errors or mistakes.