Yesterday Celtic Fans Were Treated To The Village Idiot At His Slabbering Worst.

KYThere are days, a lot of them, when Sky Sports Scotland is an unbearable torment because of the gurning, squirming, smirking face of The Village Idiot. I will never be okay with having to look at, or listen to, that halfwit on the TV screen.

But there are times when his malign presence inspires such unintended hilarity that I feel almost grateful for it. Yesterday he delivered one of those performances, one of such bitterness and barely concealed fury that watching it was sort of glorious.

And if started before a ball had even been kicked in the game at Pittodrie, when he unleashed a barrage on Chris Sutton that didn’t even muss up the ex-Celt’s hair. In fact, he laughed most of the way through it as The Village Idiot flustered and grew more unhinged.

So two weeks ago, when he explicitly said Aberdeen had lay down to us he hadn’t been talking about Celtic, hadn’t mentioned Celtic, although he was commenting on a Celtic game and a Celtic win. And although the subject of the debate was his suggestion that Aberdeen’s players hadn’t tried a leg against us, he was apoplectic about us always wanting to be involved in the story. Which only he himself had involved us in in the first place.

In case it escaped his feeble mind, Celtic hasn’t said a single word about any of this. The whole fortnight since the game passed with Celtic being occupied with Celtic things, like the AGM and some other issues you might have read about. Not one single person from our club even farted in the direction of his deranged rant; it wasn’t our players who he had accused of lacking professionalism and cheating their fans, so of course we’d let him rant without the least official acknowledgement.

So just what in God’s name was his pre-match meltdown all about? It’s amazing to see someone accuse Celtic of trying to make everything about us whilst simultaneously dragging us into an argument that we weren’t remotely involved in.

But of course, we don’t call him The Village Idiot for nothing.

Needless to say, when the final whistle went and the cameras cut to his dead-eyed stare into the middle distance I bet I wasn’t the only person who laughed. I haven’t seen a look like that since Sky captured the faces of the Ibrox fans leaving the story early when we turned them over 5-0 during the First Rodgers Years; the kind of shell-shocked expression behind which is a whirling mind repeating over and over again “tell me I didn’t just watch that …”

He knew they’d gotten off with a point and also that it hadn’t been good enough. The chance to close the gap had been flogged, and very nearly worse. He could mount no defence of the team or the manager who left Cifuentes on when that was like playing with a man down, so instead he mounted a spirited defence of the VAR officials in a tone and manner which suggested that he’d come unmoored from reality in his rising frustration.

And incredibly, his unspooling wasn’t even the most hilarious part of the after-match show; that belonged to the guy I’m more and more coming to think of as The Belgian Waffler, who made the astonishing comparison between Sam Lammers and Erling Haaland by saying that even the Norwegian predator doesn’t score ever week.

No, but he scores most weeks. And Lammers … err … doesn’t. What made this all the more preposterous is that he uttered those mind-bending words in the same weekend that Haaland had reached 50 EPL goals faster than any other player in history … in just 48 games.

Can you even imagine the scorn Rodgers would have been subjected to had he said something similar about Oh a couple of weeks ago?

The whole Sky broadcast was close to must-see TV; it was only the late intervention of the Brethren who stopped it becoming a genuine classic. But as far as The Village Idiot goes, that really was one for the highlights real, a performance so deranged that if he’d been sectioned the moment the cameras stopped recording it would have been no surprise at all.