Did A Celtic Fan Media Revolt Halt The Signing Of An EPL Winning Defender?

Last night, some of the Celtic sites highlighted the recent comments from former Leicester defender Danny Simpson.

I found The Celtic Star’s article on it particularly fascinating.

I couldn’t remember us being linked with Simpson, but I found myself agreeing with every single word that they wrote and I thought I would almost certainly have felt that way at the time.

And if I was thinking along those lines, surely I’d written about it?

So, I checked back and I found out that I had.

Obviously, The Celtic Star would have written something similar at the time, and I daresay a lot of the other sites would have had the same misgivings and expressed them in the same way.

I am astounded, in light of what is in The Celtic Star’s piece last night and my own from the time in question, that we ever even contemplated signing that guy, and from what he’s said in his interview the deal was virtually done, and it was all signed off on … and then suddenly it was not. And I am moved to wonder if we didn’t have a hand in that.

Celtic fan media would have been overwhelming negative.

The fan reaction across the forums would have been the same, intense, furious.

At the end of my article, I suggested that if we were looking for a full-back and we were willing to sign this guy that we should just approach Ibrox about Jon Flanagan; I recall vividly the disgust we all felt when they signed him.

There are some people who think our club has no standards. Do not ever believe it. Someone inside Celtic pulled the plug on this deal and we were overwhelming hostile to the idea. Did those people listen to us, or their own misgivings?

And who in God’s name ever thought that this was a good idea in the first place? It would have been a profoundly bad idea and there was no discernible defence for it, even the lamest of lame ones, “he’ll do a job for us.”

Because I don’t believe he would have done a job for us. Not at all.

The whole idea stinks, and whilst I don’t know for sure that it was fan anger which changed the minds of senior people in the club I know they keep an eye on the stuff we produce and I know they follow the forums and the social media mood very, very closely indeed.

I am grateful to the guys from The Celtic Star for highlighting this story, and for giving it the context it deserves.

It’s an excellent article from them, in which they have perfectly captured what I’d have imagined to be the mood of the time.

I cannot believe some of the near-misses our club appears to have had over the years, but this would have been a bad one. A very bad one.

When Ibrox signed the Liverpool thug Flanagan, who kicked his girlfriend on a public street as if he was on the pitch kicking a ball, women’s groups expressed their disgust but the media as a whole hailed it as a great signing. The Ibrox fan sites barely trembled although that was a deeply shameful bit of business.

I think we killed this one, in the crib, before it could disgrace us and I take a lot of satisfaction in that thought.

That sounds to me like it was a job well done.