The Media’s Carter Vickers Story Is A Pathetic Attempt At Portraying A Split At Our Club.

The comedy act site which calls itself Football Scotland and which is not in the business of reporting news as much as manufacturing it, outdid itself yesterday and there were a couple of other sites which attempted to follow it, with a pitiful story about Cameron Carter Vickers.

“Cameron Carter-Vickers defends VAR as Celtic star goes against Brendan Rodgers standpoint” shrieks the headline, suggesting that there is a split in the Celtic camp over VAR and that Carter Vickers has very deliberately contradicted the boss.

I mean, it’s a nothing story but the media has tried to spin it into something more. And in doing so they have missed the real story, or maybe missed it is the wrong word.

Because in focussing on the Rodgers-Carter Vickers “split” they are actually ignoring the real story which is that Carter Vickers is not blaming the technology but the officials behind it.

There are a lot of our fans who make the same point. Rodgers thinks the technology itself is a destructive addition to the game.

I don’t even think that he and Carter Vickers are necessarily in disagreement. Rodgers is arguing that the technology itself has made matters worse, and I could not agree more with him.

Carter Vickers says it’s those who are sitting behind the screens who are the problem and I agree with that as well … but in this case I think the whole thing should be binned, because we’re not getting rid of those officials any time soon.

But both Rodgers and Carter Vickers are in the right essentially, the only difference being that Carter Vickers thinks the technology is salvageable. The headline here is that he knows it’s officials who are rotten, either in the rank or the corrupt sense.

The media won’t focus on that story.

Rodgers, deep down, knows what’s going on but he knows the limits of what he can say.

I keep meaning to write about how refereeing in continental competition works – a few of the regular commentors have said it well, about how refs from smaller countries are intimidated by the clubs from the bigger nations – and so he knows that it’s about officials as much as anything, and he is well aware, of course, of how pathetic (or bent) Scotland’s referees are.

But honestly, the way Football Scotland tried to turn this into a story about how Carter Vickers had contradicted Rodgers was absolutely pathetic, and it sums up the level at which these people operate.

Anything for an anti-Celtic slant, even if it’s an invented one.