Celtic Fans Are Bored Now With This Pointless Matt O’Riley Transfer Non-Story.

I recently listened to a fascinating discussion between two movie fans who had never seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy and were about to start working their way through the movies. They had picked the Special Edition versions to watch which, if you’ve seen them, you’ll know is significant with the shortest of them clocking in at three and a half hours.

Before starting a near twelve hour marathon on those films one of them said a curious thing to the other; “Are the first two films really worth it? Even looking at the poster for the third, you know which of the main characters are still going to be standing in Part 3. So do we have to slog through one and two, or can we jump right in there?”

And I loved that. I found that fascinating. That movie fan didn’t feel they needed backstory or context or anything else. It could have been viewed as an absurd suggestion, but I actually know from experience that there’s some logic to it.

When it came to watching Game Of Thrones for the first time, I hadn’t yet read the books. I read a reviewer say that the first two seasons so closely follow the path of the novels you could literally go from watching them to starting Book 3 and have a fair idea of everything that was going on.

Only two seasons had aired at that point and I wanted to know what came next, and so without further ado I bought the collection and started from book three, and it was just like the guy said. There was a little variation shock but I followed it well enough.

I only caught up with Books 1 and 2 further on down the line. I was glad I did because they added colour and depth and stuff to what I was watching. By the time of the fourth season, I’d gone back to the start and read through them all, which is why I enjoyed that season even more than the ones before it. And that was in spite of having, by then, read past the story as it was unfolding on the show. I was ahead of the show for the next two years.

Celtic fans who actually follow what the manager and the club say must feel a little sense of that, and a little like the two film lovers about to embark on that epic saga, when they pondered skipping right to the last part.

Reading the media’s breathless reporting of the latest chapter in the dull, boring and utterly pointless Matt O’Riley “saga” my general feeling on this is very much like that; “Which parts of this can we skip? Because we already know where the story is going.”

Matt O’Riley will be a Celtic player at the end of this window. Matt O’Riley will be a Celtic player until the end of this campaign, at the very least.

That’s not even in the slightest doubt. It’s as if someone was able to hand us the end-of-season poster or the Official Club History of Campaign 2023-24 where we can read past current events to arrive on the other side.

We may as well have that poster in front of us, because we can speak with total assurance to Matt O’Riley being there, in the centre of the picture. We know this for a fact. Because he has said it. The club has said it. The manager has said it. What else is there to say? We have no interest in doing this business at this particular time. None whatsoever.

Yet we’re almost certainly facing another twelve days of this numbing coverage, so without suspense that it might as well be Basic Instinct 2.

I’m already at the “Oh for God’s sake who cares?” stage whenever a new club is credited with “interest” in him.

See, there is nothing interesting about any of this for me now that we know that this chapter will end with our central character alive and well. Matt O’Riley might as well be wearing what movie scholars call “plot armour”; these are the people in a movie so essential to the story or the franchise that you know nothing whatsoever can kill them.

And to me, that takes a lot of the fun out of following a story. That feeling of not knowing what will happen to the characters grips you like a vice; it’s why I love surprise endings and shock twists. There will be no surprise ending or shock twist here.

For the record, the two film fans finally decided to watch the Rings Trilogy, which I have always considered outstanding in every way and they loved every single second, as I always have when watching them, even knowing how the story goes. Those movies have scope, spectacle, daring and the limitless imagination of JRR Tolkien to work from.

But in this case, there is literally nothing to see.

Think of it as one of those shows where they tease the main character’s fate relentlessly but just can’t bring themselves to do him or her any real harm. It’s like a badly written B movie disaster, and that gets old very quickly. That starts to grate on the viewer and I am already bored stiff with this and just about ready to change the channel.