Scottish Football Punditry More And More Resembles The Blind Leading The Blind.

The second to last episode of the stunning first season of True Detective contains one of my favourite pieces of writing in the run of the show. It comes when Marty Hart, played by Woody Harrelson, is talking to his former partner Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaghy, and listening to his theories on a series of events which may or may not be related. Hart thinks he’s lost it.

“It’s like you’ve been alone too long,” he says, “like maybe you told yourself this story and kept drinking until you believed it.”

It’s a beautiful piece of dialogue, and all the better for being recognisable to those of us who study Scottish football journalism in detail. We’ve seen this phenomenon many times and it doesn’t even have to involve alcohol, although in some cases I’m very nearly certain that it does. It’s delusional thinking, and there is a lot of it going around.

Last night, I listened to Speirs latest podcast, and I was a little astonished at two facets of the conversation. His guests were Stephen McGowan and Ewan Murray, so we’re not exactly talking about The Brains Trust here. But even taking into account the relatively low IQ of the contributors, there were still some lapses for which there is no excuse.

When they discussed Celtic’s transfer strategy, they were moved to wonder why Brendan Rodgers is essentially breaking his word to himself. They critiqued the run of underwhelming, even confusing, transfer windows which they recognise started before Ange Postecoglou left the club. But neither of them, nor Speirs himself, drew the obvious conclusion which Celtic fans have drawn already and which many of us feared from the start; this coincides with the arrival, in the building, of one Mark Lawwell. I am sure they all realise this, so why not say it?

There is no question that a lot of people want to fit Rodgers up as the patsy if this season unravels, and the signings will be part of that. But they’ll have to ignore the man’s own statements if they do, all those statements where he has unequivocally stated his desire to see pace and power in this team. The reluctance to simply name Lawwell and his daddy as denying him that, and to question what his hiring means for Celtic overall, is astonishing nevertheless.

And I have to wonder at a media which obviously cannot stand Celtic not wanting to write a story which is highly critical of the Celtic board. Are they scared to? What exactly do they think will happen if they ask the questions that the bloggers have been asking for a long time now? Was the Lawwell appointment the best thing for the club, or a piece of naked cronyism? Why is it that only Celtic sites have asked whether Lawwell really was qualified for the role?

Some of these guys are also shameless pushers of the idea that the directors deserve the praise for Celtic’s successes rather than the managers and players who actually won the trophies and titles. We all know that Celtic managers have, to some extent, had their hands tied by the people at the top of the club and that none has been properly allowed to grow it in the way they’d have liked. Most of us conclude that Celtic’s triumphs have been in spite of these folks rather than because of them, yet the media continues to push this discredited narrative.

I have to wonder if we’ve really left the days of succulent lamb behind. With the collapse of Rangers, Celtic were the last superpower standing. I wonder, and I’ve wondered for a while, if we’re now doling it out instead of the club across town. Celtic frequently get slated, but it’s usually the manager or the players or the fans taking the flak.

The finger never points at the obvious targets.

Our media are cowards, and we’ve always known that, but the longer this charade about the transfer windows goes on the more I wonder if they aren’t in fact compromised by more than just their unwillingness to show some guts.

The second element of the show which amazed me was when, at the end, they had a chat about The Mooch. And it’s here that I thought of that moment from True Detective series one. Because that part of the conversation devolved into the surreal.

None of them could believe the unravelling of his managerial bona fides. They openly questioned, as if it had only dawned on them, the notion that he had been the mastermind behind the Steven Gerrard “success.” They actually used to call him The Brains.

I laughed out loud at that, and then to my surprise they actually, again for the first time, openly questioned whether or not Gerrard’s own “success” should be re-evaluated.

I find these people incredible. How far were we ahead of them? When one of them described The Mooch as someone who “liked to talk” I thought that was brilliant, since I gave him that nickname in his first weeks in the gig for precisely that reason. They are so slow to reach the conclusions a lot of us reached early on, and even now they find it hard to fully take the leap.

When it came to Gerrard, they told themselves the lie that he had worked some miracle at Ibrox until they believed it and when the time came for them to look for a replacement for Van Bronckhorst, they conned themselves somehow into believing that The Mooch was some sort of genius behind the front man and that he was the perfect candidate.

I cannot believe they ever came to that conclusion by rational thought. Are these industry pros or gushing fan-boys who cannot see past their emotional selves? The Legend Of Michael Beale was a lie they told themselves until they believed it and we were telling them that right from the start. Their surprise that he’s already on the brink of the sack at Sunderland is astounding, because not a single one of us is surprised by that at all.

If they’d been able to properly analyse Gerrard’s record and examine the title win in the context of COVID and our own collapse, had they been in the least bit objective about it instead of writing fiction about how the balance of power had tilted, they might have concluded that Gerrard wasn’t that good a coach and then there would have been nothing worth attributing to The Mooch in the first place. Who wants to hire the “brains” behind a shambles?

I have long complained that one of the worst traits of the Scottish sports media is that there is not an original thinker amongst them, and they are so lazy now that they are forever copying each other’s work, and so an untrue story can trend on every outlet before anyone even questions the premise of it. And so can such fanciful rubbish as they bought into here.

So, rumours and falsehoods and myths grow because they are spread like a virus, from outlet to outlet and from writer to writer and it’s no wonder that some of these people swallow them whole until they can no longer tell fact from fiction or the truth from the lie, because everyone around them believes it, their papers report it and the radio stations and the phone ins echo the story back to them. That’s how fantasy comes to resemble reality for them.

They say that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and we in the blogosphere might not know everything that goes on in the game but we analyse it and understand what we’re watching a Hell of a lot better than a lot of these folks do. When it came to The Mooch we knew exactly what we were watching, and so too by the way did the smarter fans at Ibrox who never wanted him there in the first place and who hadn’t drunk the Gerrard Kool Aid either.

And to think these people look down their noses at the ordinary fans.

At one point they all had a good laugh sarcastically referring to “the mainstream media”, which was nothing but an expression of contempt for those of us who use that phrase … although most of us do it now ironically. They still think of themselves as somehow superior to the rest of us, although if you grabbed any three hacks in this country and somehow strung their braincells together you’d be lucky to generate enough juice to power a 40-watt bulb.

I look at the sheer quality of some of the blogs and of people like Tony Haggarty and I marvel at the people who have made careers writing nonsense and shilling bullshit and I can only imagine what the newsrooms would look like if they had been filled by people with passion for the game instead of folk who have simply fed off of it for too long and who still think that they are the Masters of The Universe instead of folk who’ve been behind the curve for years now.

I cannot even imagine how dire the level of debate would be in our game without fan media. I remember the days before the bloggers, when people like Fergus could be vilified without anyone being able to offer a dissenting voice, when our players could be smeared as “thugs and thieves” without the hacks responsible being held to account … and I know that if I wasn’t doing this that I would still be reading the bloggers every single day, because it’s the only place we get the complete picture, the only place in Scottish football to read real analysis, the only place where the writers do their thing “without fear or favour.”

The only place they aren’t eating the succulent lamb.