McGowan Unleashes His Fury Now There Are No More Scraps From Celtic’s Table.

My friend and colleague Joe McHugh has published a cracking piece tonight on the latest piece of unbridled ranting from Stephen McGowan, who has had a meltdown at “idiot bloggers who don’t have a scoobie.” By that he means people like Joe and I, although apparently Joe has much better manners and is a lot less abusive.

McGowan needs to calm down a bit. His contempt for the bloggers is fully reflected in the contempt some of us have for him and for his profession. Yet on Off The Ball at the weekend he painted a picture of himself as someone completely absent from the ranks of the “in the knows”, which is exactly what this blog has been saying about him for ages.

“You get, you are the board’s go-to man … I mean, Celtic don’t brief or leak anything. In fact, I wish that they did, it would make life an awful lot easier,” he wailed.

Which makes me laugh because I know for a fact that Celtic both brief and leak, and I can even tell you a handful of names that they regularly brief and leak to with a certain Daily Record writer at the head of the list. What McGowan means is that for whatever reason they just don’t brief or leak to him anymore, although he was once Lawwell’s pet.

Let me tell you something about McGowan; I’ve knocked that guy a lot. But he has good sources somewhere because he does write a lot of things which turn out to be on the money. I do suspect that he has at least one source inside Celtic Park, which isn’t the same thing as being in the circle of trust. Quite the opposite, in fact.

On top of that, almost everything he said the other day on Off The Ball was absolutely bang on. Whatever obligation he felt once to protect Lawwell and the rest of them he no longer does, because his recent coverage is in no way complimentary and he is pointing the finger of blame exactly where it belongs, and commenting freely on the utter absurdity of a club with tens of millions in the bank failing to bring in the required players in January.

“I mean Peter Lawwell says in his statement … ‘Ah we tried to spend our money, clubs didn’t want our money’,” McGowan said mockingly. “Well, every player is for sale, maybe they just weren’t offering enough of it.”

And I agree with every word of that. Either we couldn’t identify players the manager wanted – which is bad and a dreadful reflection on our scouting team – or we did identify them and did the usual pissing about and penny pinching for which this club under Lawwell is known.

McGowan has gotten right to it, and he is one of the few in the mainstream press who absolutely gets it and is absolutely willing to say what’s right in front of us, and he would get the credit he deserves for doing that if he wasn’t so busy behaving like a brat.