Is Chris Sutton On A Journey Towards Being Just Another Media Pundit Who Slags Celtic?

I’m not surprised tonight to see that Chris Sutton is talking up the Ibrox club and even offering them some friendly advice.

He’s entitled to his view of course, and he gets paid to express it, but more and more the feeling grows that this guy doesn’t have a good word to say about us at the moment and is under orders to be nicer to the club across town.

The anti-Celtic rhetoric in the places he works has been growing more pronounced as time goes by.

And we’ve all seen ex-Celtic players in the media start out as good, objective professionals but move slowly, but surely, towards a position of cynicism if not outright hostility to us … people like Andy Walker are a good case in point.

I just hoped that Sutton wasn’t going to be one of them, and he’s not gone completely over to the dark side yet. If he had, everyone would be talking about it. I just can’t remember when he last said something about us that wasn’t a dig or a snark or some criticism of the manager.

I’ve been writing about his insistence that Rodgers is somehow to blame for the poor signings, but let’s not forget he was slamming Idah before he’d even kicked a ball for us and that’s not kosher, that’s not the way a former player should be writing about a new Celtic signing.

That’s guaranteed negative headlines across the board and since he’s working in the media, I’m fairly sure that he knew that. Not to mention the impact it could have had on the player.

As bad as Mark Wilson and the likes of Andy Walker are, even they might have a drawn a line on that one. Frankly, it’s the kind of stuff I’d have expected from the likes of Charlie Nicholas or Frank McAvennie.

There’s really no excuse for how that was done.

Praising Clement is all the rage right now, and as he’s surrounded by people who would lick the guys boots at the next press conference it wouldn’t look blatantly unprofessional even by their naff standards.

So he’s only the latest to drink the Clement Kool Aid and he’ll not be the last, but his latest remarks play into the growing impression that this is a guy who knows what he has to do to stay on the right side of his paymasters and is willing to.

Slagging Celtic is always a good way of getting ahead. Ask Wilson, Walker, McAvennie and Nicholas. They all know how this works.

It’s how they stay relevant. Sutton has a higher profile and more talent than those jokers, so it’s hard to believe he needs to be putting the boot in just to keep his gig going, but it’s not impossible, because we’ve seen it before.