Jackson’s Article Wants Collum Sacked. But In “Dougie Dougie” Officials Told Celtic Lies.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? A while since we did a full-scale dissection of a Keith Jackson piece. Today’s rant is worth going over in detail, as there is, to use his own phrase “a lot to unpack.” Boy oh boy, what guff this man has written.

Let’s start with the headline, which Jackson doesn’t write but which he allows to appear over his articles. “Brendan Rodgers has restored Celtic calm after eye popping panic and relit fire under (Ibrox) concerns – Keith Jackson.”

Right away, he’s losing the plot. “Eye popping panic” doesn’t begin to describe how most Celtic fans were feeling. We knew we had problems, but the majority of us trusted the manager to deal with those on the pitch. Where we had doubts were about those off it. Those doubts have not gone away just because Brendan Rodgers has the team winning.

“It was a generous gift to give at this festive time of year.”

What gift was this? I think he means the game itself, but is he really talking about officials giving us points? He’s not very subtle, is he?

“But, like all good presents, Saturday’s barnstormer of an Old Firm derby does require some fairly serious unpacking. First and foremost, Celtic’s 2-1 win should at least allow a bit of perspective to prevail at one end of Glasgow and, by opening up an eight point lead at the top of the table, it will most certainly provide Brendan Rodgers with some badly needed breathing space at a critical moment in his first season back in charge.”

Old Firm derby. It boils my blood. It will boil my blood for along as these people are dragging us into this cesspit which we want no part of. As far as perspective goes, I think most Celtic fans had a sense of it. We know we’ve not been brilliant, but a lot of us were perfectly capable of looking at this in a reasonable and rational manner. People at Celtic have made huge mistakes this season already, but there was nothing here that was incapable of being fixed … and we have the resources and the ability to do just that. I do agree that Rodgers has “breathing space” but that’s mostly from his media snipers who have yet again been silenced.

“It was only a couple of weeks ago, after all, that the most entitled element at the core of this club was threatening to turn full scale against the manager, while posturing mutinously towards the directors box at the same time. Sack the board. Sack the boss. In the furious aftermath of that home defeat to Hearts on December 16 they would have chased Hoopy the Huddle Hound down London Road so utterly consumed had they become with a sense of eye popping panic at the very thought of failing to win a 13th title in 14 years.”

A couple of months back, Jackson was standing alongside the Ibrox fans who wanted to rip their club’s entire upper echelon out, to sack the manager, to bag the players, the whole bit. When Celtic fans express their disgust its “entitlement.” Such double standards. Celtic fans are not entitled. A growing number of us, however, believe that the directors are entitled, and that they believe Celtic is theirs to do with as they please. If Jackson thinks we’re not fully entitled – as fans paying their money – to express our disgust at the chairman’s son presiding over a catastrophic summer window which didn’t meet the manager’s needs, he is a bigger moron than we already recognise him to be.

“So Saturday’s blood and thunder victory over the nearest and dearest will at least have added a bit of calm to the situation and maybe even provided a moment to pause and reflect on the ridiculous nature of this overreaction. Over the course of more than 100 minutes of almighty derby day mayhem, Rodgers seized back control of this season’s title race and, as a result, Rangers have been left to lick their wounds and reassess where they might be heading under the management of Philippe Clement.”

First things first, I find the term “nearest and dearest” in relation to the Ibrox club to be highly objectionable and I don’t care how humorously he intended it. Secondly, if he reads the Celtic sites he’ll have seen calm over the last few weeks, even prior to the game. The so-called “over-reaction” was only partly to do with results; we are concerned about how our club is being run. We are concerned that a small number of people who have been at Parkhead too long have convinced themselves that they are geniuses when in fact they’ve made huge mistakes and they continue to make them. We can separate that from the success of the last few years.

“The Belgian has settled very impressively into the position since taking over from Michael Beale but the bottom line is that he and his players came up short when it mattered most of all at the weekend and this latest painful defeat will have relit the fire under some long running concerns. Put it this way, if Clement had at least one proper striker at his disposal then Rangers would have made it home safely back across the river Clyde with their own title ambitions unharmed and maybe even significantly enhanced.”

Presumptive garbage. Even if the Ibrox club had possessed a decent striker instead of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, I always got the impression that Celtic had more in the locker at the weekend than they showed and I think we would have just found that extra gear and scored again if that was required. Their problems are not down to the absence of one player, and this is where they continue to underestimate us … which as I said this morning, suits us just fine.

“Instead he had to make do with Cyriel Dessers – a player with an unfortunate habit for taking five clumsy touches when only one good one is required. Dessers has been left to carry the load of leading Clement’s attack but – try as he undoubtedly does – Saturday provided yet more proof that he is simply not equipped for the task. When his team needed him to hold the ball up and bring others into play, way too often he could not.”

This is such rubbish because it lets too many people at Ibrox off the hook. Danilo is injured, sure, but Lammers is fit. Roofe is fit. (For the moment anyway.) Sima is the greatest player ever to come to Scotland on loan if you believe some of the stuff written about him. They spent a fortune on their forward line this summer, and they want to blame it all on just one man. They had more forward players available for the game than we did, so what is this? Dessers is a joke of a signing, but then again some of us had been saying that when the media was still talking him up.

“And, yet more damning, on the numerous occasions when he was given a sight at Celtic’s goal he froze like a rabbit in the headlights. Let’s be blunt, Cyriel is a serial offender in that particular department which is precisely why Clement cannot hope to put up a title fight from here on in without beefing up his attacking options this month. The arrival on loan of Wolves striker Fabio Silva might improve things for the short term at least. But Clement should also be asking his board to pick up the phone to Hearts and, at the very least, ask how much would be required to secure the services of Lawrence Shankland.”

And if the Hearts board had a shred of ambition for their club that would be a shorter conversation than those with Logan Roy in Succession which consisted of two words, with the second being “off.” Celtic’s efforts to sign Miovski, if we chose to progress them, would result in a similarly large number, with the only difference that we can afford to pay it should we want to. If I were at Hearts, there’s actually no sum on earth which would get me to part with Shankland and let him go to Ibrox; their fans would be fully entitled to express their fury.

“While Silva comes with a huge £35m price tag and a bundle of unfulfilled promise, Shankland is tried, tested and a prolific operator in the SPFL.”

Actually, Silva arrives with no price tag; he’s a loanee and they aren’t paying up front for him. When will they stop being seduced by these big numbers without context? They did this with Diallo and with Matondo; these were “superstars” because they had once attracted big fees. By the time they were at Ibrox their values had plummeted, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone near the place. Wolves paid £35 million for Silva and got 5 goals in 70 games, and he’s since been passed around like a scud book in a boys rugby club. Who knows what he’s worth on the open market? Certainly not that number. And yeah, Shankland has scored goals in the SPFL, and he would score them at whichever club he was at. Hearts, however, do not score goals without him … which is why they would be mad to let him leave.

“And Clement can’t afford to cross his fingers and hope for the best while waiting to discover if Silva might suddenly come of age here in Scotland after being farmed out previously to clubs in Belgium and Holland. It could be, of course, that Rangers don’t have the funds required to tempt Hearts into doing business. But it’s a discussion which should be taking place nonetheless.”

An approach I certainly won’t try in order to finally secure Sophie Turner’s phone number. I am not optimistic. I have no reason to believe that having the discussion “nonetheless” would be anything other than a waste of my time and quite possibly make her think she has a stalker. What Jackson really means of course is that Ibrox should call Hearts and then leak the story so that it unsettles the player to the extent he starts banging on the door for the move.

“Because what any manager needs in situations like these is the comfort of knowing without doubt that he has players in his team who can be relied upon to deliver at key moments. That’s why Rodgers spoke in such gushing terms about the performance of his captain, Callum McGregor, after Saturday’s skirmish in the east end. McGregor was the best player on the pitch over the entire course of the contest. But, for the ten or fifteen minutes before Celtic’s opening goal, he was the one who grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and refused to let go.”

McGregor was immense. But I slightly bristle at the idea that for ten or fifteen minutes before our goal that we needed him to grab the game by the scruff of the neck, as though we were floundering at that point and needed his leadership. We were in total command, but McGregor was the player who made everything tick. There is no doubt about that.

“During that period McGregor raised his game to a level which no-one in a Rangers shirt could match and most certainly not Todd Cantwell, who was charged directly with the task of keeping him in check. Cantwell had started brightly and carried a creative threat going forward during a rattling first 15 minutes but when McGregor really got motoring in the middle of the pitch the Englishman was left choking on his fumes. He simply did not recover.”

I love the Ibrox fan and media obsession over this joker. I really do. Cantwell is amongst the most over-rated players we’ve watched in Scotland, and this blog and others keep on saying this and it seems that the more we do the more he’s talked up by the mainstream press and the Ibrox fan sites. Big Sutton must have been laughing his backside off at that performance, and the crowning moment of it was when Celtic fans applauded him off the pitch.

“That will also come as a concern for Clement because Cantwell is arguably the single most talented player in his squad. But the manager doesn’t have the time or the room to carry any passengers from this point forward. Of course – and quite shrewdly – the Rangers boss deflected attention away from his team’s own deficiencies at the weekend by jabbing an accusatory finger in the direction of match referee Nick Walsh and VAR operator Willie Collum.”

If Cantwell is the “single most talented player in his squad” then Clement would be as well chucking it right now. Can you believe that he said Clement is “shrewd” to deflect attention from his and his team’s failings by focussing on the officials? Isn’t that a bit self-damning? It certainly damns everyone else in the journalistic profession here and it’s one of the most accurate things in the piece because not a single newspaper is really focussed on how bad their performance was, with everyone looking at Hampden instead. If we had lost and even attempted that they’d be turning the temperature up on us instead of on the officials.

“Clement insisted afterwards that his side should have been given a penalty in the first half after a blatant handball by Alistair Johnston. But he was wrong. Somehow, despite themselves, the officials managed to reach the right decision by not awarding the spot kick. But it was how they arrived at that point that fails just about every conceivable smell test. Broadcasters Sky and BBC Radio Scotland were informed directly from Clydesdale House that the penalty was not awarded because Johnston’s arm movement was not considered to be ‘unnatural’. Whatever that is supposed to mean.”

What does “fails just about every conceivable smell test” actually mean? What exactly is Jackson saying here? What are they expecting to find on this VAR audio? The officials singing The Celtic Song? The broadcasters had that information because some of them are plugged into VAR and can hear every word, so they know already what was said and what wasn’t and if it was newsworthy we’d almost certainly know that already. I would have thought that the explanation – which is exactly the one that’s in the SFA regulations which my sister downloaded for me at half-time in the game – speaks for itself. He knows full well what it is supposed to mean; it means Johnston didn’t make his body bigger and he wasn’t trying to hit the ball out with his arm. It was a bad bounce of the ball, that’s all, and that doesn’t meet the standard required to award a penalty. Let’s face it, if Goldson’s netball effort wasn’t a spot kick there is no way this was.

“To then produce a screen grab – midway through the second half – showing that Abdallah Sima was offside seconds earlier, sniffed very much like a hastily arranged and wholly unconvincing retrospective cover up. It was ironic that Neil Lennon was watching from Sky’s studio because the former Celtic boss might have a mental flashback to the furore caused by the words ‘Dougie Dougie’ on that fateful afternoon at Tannadice when his players were denied a penalty of their own.”

What a ridiculous paragraph. Just plain ridiculous. A retrospective cover-up of what? For what purpose? Nobody fabricated this, it’s a fact, and it’s an additional clarification on a decision that had already been made. The decision didn’t change either way, and actually if you read the statement from Bobby Madden he actually does clarify the order of the announcements and the way the decision would have been made on the pitch. He got right down to the reasons for the goal kick instead of the free kick. Cover up? And comparing it to “Dougie Dougie” where an official actually told Celtic lies is disgusting. There is no indication here that anyone has lied. The audio will certainly be played for their club officials. It’s not as if they’re going to turn up at Hampden to find that it’s been “misplaced” by a mobile phone “accidently dropped” into the sea. Ibrox might not like the official explanation and their media lackies might want to dive off the deep end, as they did over the famous “Dundee email” about which all sorts of malfeasance was alleged, but they just sound nuts.

“Regrettably, this does have a nasty whiff of Dougie Dougie II about it even though the decision was ultimately correct. And, as Dougie McDonald discovered all those years ago, such controversies don’t tend to go away by themselves.”

Again, this is absolute garbage and the intent – which is to force Willie Collum to quit or to force the SFA to take action against him – is equally clear. As I said this morning, if he’s corrupt let’s get it out there. If the allegation is that he has an anti-Ibrox agenda let’s get that on the record and once it’s there let’s clear the Augean Stables out once and for all. But honest to God, the reaction to a decision which is technically correct is preposterous and so over-the-top that had I known nothing else about the game I would have been able to tell you who lost the moment I read some of this hysteria.

At least now the agenda for these people is out there in the open. In bringing up “Dougie Dougie” they want Collum sacked. The difference is that Celtic had iron clad evidence that officials had conspired with each with the intent of feeding us brazen lies. There is exactly no evidence at all that anything remotely like that has happened … Jackson has rightly identified this as a deflection tactic. He’s also shown a willingness to play along with it.

That is some shameful behaviour.