Celtic Park Is Not “Too Dangerous” For Our Rival’s Fans. The Claim Is Abhorrent.

I should be done writing about Keevins. This guy should be an utter irrelevance to our club, but he hangs in at The Sunday Mail, a dying newspaper on the bones of its arse because it still employs people like him, and he continues to write the kind of stuff about us which should get the entire outlet banned.

He is a joke, but the paper doesn’t have to carry his copy. That’s a choice, and it’s a choice which has played its part in their decline. We should judge the whole paper on that choice and act accordingly. No more credentialling these guys. If they want tickets to our games they should have to buy them. The days of giving them press cards like they represent journalism ought to be over.

I cannot stand this guy. Every time I write about him I feel like I want to take a shower. This guy isn’t worth a minute of my time or a fraction of my brainpower, although fortunately that is all challenging his dumb, ignorant “opinions” usually requires.

He decries the bloggers, as part of his general scorn for the views of the people who actually put money into the game, but we fulfil one simple function; we don’t let people like him do this stuff any more without a response. As Gordon Gekko says in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, “When you stop telling lies about me, I’ll stop telling the truth about you.”

Today’s column was about The Mooch and his throwaway remark after Newcastle had beaten his Sunderland side in the FA Cup last week, the one about how their derby still lets in fans. The home fans must have listened to that in bewilderment. Why in God’s name is a guy with responsibilities to their team taking a pathetic pot-shot at his previous employers and the game up here? What’s that got to do with the awesome task in front of him at their club?

The English media barely mentioned that comment far less explored it, seeing it as a matter of no consequence whatsoever to their actual job, which is reporting on the football rather than on the soap opera. Yesterday his team lost again. His jacket is on a shoogly nail already with their fans not exactly beloved of him or his style of public park punt it up the pitch football. That so many in our media were in love with this guy seems too ridiculous for words.

Still, Keevins liked what he had to say and decided to prove the old adage about fools going where wise men fear to tread, and devoted his article to mindlessly ranting about the absence of fans at the derby, a subject so old and decrepit it makes him look like a kid in his late teens with his whole life stretched out in front of him.

How many more words are people in punditry going to waste on telling us how awful that is without any of them actually getting to the nuts of it and writing the facts? They all seem to want to dance around apportioning the blame where it belongs, and we all know exactly where that is. It has become a tiresome subject, one only worth writing about when there is some new development in the story, and The Mooch’s pathetic intervention on it certainly wasn’t that.

Where I do draw the line is where people write lies. Not simply make mistakes or come up a little short on pointing the finger where it belongs, but the actual act of writing and publishing untruths. There was a time when the journalistic profession frowned on that above all else. It has ended more careers than bad writing ever did. That was a standard the industry fiercely clung onto. Nowadays, editors apparently could not care less.

There are people in the media who cry about the disrespect the public has for their profession. I always say the same thing; do not blame the public which long since grew sick and tired of being spoon-fed PR led bullshit and distortions of reality. Blame the writers who pushed that stuff, the editors who passed it fit for publication and the management that decided that the readers were idiot children they could lie to with impunity.

None of this is the fault of the general public. Most people do not take kindly to being treated like fools. That is why there is such disregard for the mainstream press, and the truly horrible thing about that is that this is the moment when we most need them at the top of their game.

Keevins, this morning, gave an object lesson in why so few people trust these folks. No media outlet which valued its remaining shred of credibility should be giving this guy a platform to write such spiteful, ignorant rubbish as he turned out today.

First, he called it “directorial tit-for-tat”, which is a neat sounding phrase but contained not one scintilla of truth. This is not “tit-for-tat” and it never has been. We told them from the start that whatever they did, we would mirror exactly. They did it anyway. All we’ve done is been true to our stated policy, which any reasonable person would conclude was fair.

See, this is where I never quite wrap my brain around the cowardice of our media. Everyone involved has to know that we’ve played this straight, that our response is proportionate and in line with what every other club would do. But we constantly have to punch back against the allegation that our actions are somehow childish and unbecoming. We didn’t start this. We aren’t responsible for it. This is not a crisis of Celtic’s making. We merely did what any other club in our position would have done faced with a similar situation.

Up until that point, all Keevins had done here was repeat that shaky narrative. What he said next though crossed the line. “There will be no away fans at Ibrox or Celtic Park on derby day because it has become too dangerous to have them there,” he said.

Which is a barefaced lie, and I’m not even letting him plead ignorance as Celtic’s statements on this are a matter of public record and are readily available to anyone who wants to peruse them. The Ibrox club has endangered our supporters. Since nobody in the media or in the governing bodies has bothered to call that out and respond appropriately, we have banned theirs from our ground. Their absence from Celtic Park has nothing to do with the environment there being unsafe. Until their ground is made safe, their fans are not welcome at ours.

That’s a sufficiently interesting story that none in the media should feel any need to gild the lily and sensationalise it further. It’s huge. Our club is openly violating the SFA’s regulations by banning their fans. That’s huge. That’s a story. I wonder why nobody wants to properly write it? I wonder why nobody wants to dig deep and do a major piece on it?

He then goes on to ramble about how the downslope for The Mooch was the day he let Partick Thistle score a goal against them in the interests of fair play, because, in his mind, fans up here are too crazy to accept an act like that. I don’t often defend the Ibrox fan-base but I can tell you that the great majority of them did recognise that as a generous act and were impressed by it and thought that the guy did the right thing.

But I digress; I mention it as an example of Keevins’ contempt for the fans as a whole, the people who in many ways have been paying his salary for years. There’s a reason though why I don’t buy his paper or listen to his radio show or link to his columns on this site; he gets not one penny more out of us than is necessary to ridicule his pathetic output.

He then moved on to the game in April, still months away. “The next … meeting … may well put a down payment on the league title for the winner. It will certainly come under Category A in terms of the need for massive security at Ibrox, excluding away fans for the simple reason they have become a threat to public order just by being there.”

What a despicable thing to write. Our fans are the “threat to public order”? Why, when I read that, do I recall court cases from days gone by when judges raised in the 50’s blamed woman who had been victims of sexual assault for their own ordeals because they dressed in short dresses when they were out on the town? You would think that the fans who couldn’t control their own behaviour and were trigged to violence by the mere sight of ours would be labelled the “threat to public order”, right? But no, in this idiot’s head that’s us.

Honest to God, this is the stuff that I lose my mind over, and I know for some people there is a world where Keevins is sitting sniggering reading this kind of article because in his eyes its “job done”, but I long since ceased believing that because that’s to credit him with more intelligence than he has. That man is a bona-fide moron and a snivelling coward to boot.

He is why none of our fans trust the mainstream press and as long as it employs people like him and lets them write dirge like that, that’s never, ever going to change.