Keith Jackson’s Latest Celtic Article Puts Him Up To His Knees In The Scum Swamp.

I don’t intend to sugar-coat this, because some things you just can’t. Keith Jackson’s latest piece is a disgrace, and so whilst I had no intention of sitting in front of this computer today and writing anything about him at all, I find myself doing it just the same. By a similar token, I had no intention of defending this board, and I am not about to, except in one very narrow sense.

Writing about Celtic right now should be easy. This club which never generates as much news as the one across town, because on a surface level it seems to run smoothly, is mired in a crisis of its own making. There are sufficient, actual, issues relating to this that even our dire, incompetent media should be able to shoot for the target and not miss the mark.

And when the hacks are having a go at our directors and the lack of ambition shown by this club at the moment, as far as a lot of us are concerned they are fair game and it’s all fair comment. I have no wish to defend them from those attacks. They are more than earned. But we should not be expected to sit here and accept it when one of these people crosses lines of decency and respectability and just writes bile. Which is what Keith Jackson did today.

In some ways, you have to kind of admire it. Let’s not deny that there is skill involved in what Jackson did this morning. When the goal is gaping in front of you like this and you merely have to tap the ball into the net, it almost takes skill to so perfectly blast it over the bar. Most of us would be unable to do it even if we were trying to. He does it so regularly he must surely practice.

Let’s get on with it, then. Starting, as ever, with the headline.

Celtic trust is the crux of Brendan Rodgers issues but fans must be told why distress signal was ignored – Keith Jackson

Bad start. Already, these are being framed as “Brendan Rodgers issues.” Which is either a complete misreading of the situation, or the wilful distortion of the facts. Let’s be honest, Jackson could easily be too stupid to understand things. Or he could just be stirring the soup. Neither of those things would be new, and so neither would be a surprise.

The Scottish Premiership title hangs in the balance with Rangers closing in on the leaders after their slip-up against Aberdeen.

Hard to argue with that. With the headings out of the way, we’re straight into the piece.

One of the non-negotiable fundamentals of good leadership is the ability to engender trust. The trouble is, few things in life are more difficult to earn or as easy to lose. And once it’s gone, it’s almost always impossible to claw it back.

You wonder which textbook he got that from. It’s more cogent than a usual Jackson opening.

When it’s present, everything is possible. When it’s absent, nothing is possible. And the key to keeping it intact is to be, at all times, both believable and credible. Failure to do so leads inevitably to suspicion and intolerance. Most of all, those who have been empowered and placed into such a lofty position have a responsibility to ensure that their actions are underpinned by a sense of sound, logical reasoning.

That sounds so much like a paragraph written by ChatGPT, filled with words and phraseology Jackson would never use and has never used before that I wonder if it can be anything else? This next part is definitely written by him. Because it reeks.

Just ask Nicola Sturgeon who, having ignored pretty much all of the above during her reign at Holyrood, was reduced to whimpering in self pity last week while effectively claiming that the dog had eaten her WhatsApp. Around 48 hours later, on Friday afternoon, Brendan Rodgers was being forced to front up a very different kind of inquiry in the wake of another transfer window gone horribly wrong.

What that unprompted attack on the First Minister had to do with Celtic’s lack of spending I do not know. There were genuine failures of leadership he could have highlighted, but this is what he went for. I find the entire thing to be pretty disgusting, especially his assertion that she was “whimpering in self-pity.” She certainly was not. That woman had an awesome responsibility on her shoulders, matters of life and death to decide, far greater considerations than anything this walking advertisement for contraception could ever hope to comprehend far less deal with, and she did so with dignity and dedication and selflessness. I don’t care what your politics are; even her political foes recognise that this was a good woman working under the crushing weight of an immense undertaking, which nothing in her life had ever remotely prepared her for and which will psychologically scar her for the rest of it. It’s not too much to ask that we react with compassion to that. If she almost broke down during the questioning it’s because she is genuinely haunted by the memory of those days and when she says these decisions kept her up at night, when she says the dead will be in her thoughts until the day she dies I absolutely believe it.

Since this yammering halfwit opened this particular door, I think it would be instructive to see what Scotland might have looked like if this intellectual lightweight had been on the job instead, bringing to bear all those many hours he didn’t spend in a student library during his youth.

On 12 March 2020, as most people had already come to the conclusion that we were in a very serious situation, he sent out a tweet about “working from home” in which he asked “Am I the only one who thinks we might be getting our knickers in an un-necessary twist here?”

Yeah, at that particular moment you were one of the very small minority of people on the planet who was thinking that. The rest of us were too busy worrying about our families and ourselves and our jobs and watching every news bulletin with a lump in our throats.

It wasn’t the only time that he came off sounding like an alt-right halfwit during the crisis and he frequently attacked Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Government. And since he can’t write coherently or knowledgably on the subject he’s paid to understand, I strongly suggest that he stay far, far, far away from politics and current affairs, which are way above his pay-grade and vastly beyond his limited intellect.

Even when scientists were posting their data that 200,000 people might die (a conservative estimate as it turned out because we exceeded that figure even after we had taken every available measure to prevent it) and that we’d be looking at upwards of 1 million suffering from the long-term effects of the disease, this clown was still banging on about not being able to go to the pub or the game.

Even long after it was abundantly clear to most rational people that the COVID emergency had not been hyped or anyone “getting their knickers in a twist”, and that lockdowns had prevented thousands of un-necessary deaths, he wrote an article in December 2021 which was epic in its mindless, colossal departure from any sense of responsible journalism. It was a politicised rant which would not have looked out of place on the 4Chan forums.

“Nicola Sturgeon cranked up the fear with blood curdling warning but what Scottish football needs is answers,” screamed the headline, after the details of the Omicron variant sparked emergency meetings of governments all across Europe and the world. Far from being a Nicola Sturgeon inspired panic, Omicron was a matter of worldwide concern, and it was not difficult for even the stupidest person to understand that a vaccine evading mutation which spread even quicker than the original one might be devastating to public health, and that was before we even had firm data on whether or not its lethality had changed along with everything else.

So if I might be permitted, I’d like to offer a little context here.

COVID-19 is so named because it’s a coronavirus. The common cold is a variant coronavirus and it spreads rapidly and easily. COVID-19’s full name is SARS-COV-2. Note that bit at the start. SARS. What is SARS? Well SARS-COV-1 is the big brother to the virus which swept the world and caused all that misery. Meaning “severe acute respiratory syndrome”, the first SARS coronavirus was discovered in 2002, and caused a global public health emergency which lasted until 2004. We were lucky SARS was not as transmissible as its scrawny nearly identical twin, because if it had been the world, the whole world, would look a lot different than it does today. Because the case fatality rate for SARS was 11%. That’s more than ten times that of SARS-COV-2, and we had no way of knowing if that tiny shift had put us on that trajectory.

Jackson’s appalling piece was gratuitously offensive, not just ignorant but abhorrent, and even reading it now I feel my anger rise at the nature of it, the sheer contempt for everyone who had suffered and died in the pandemic and for those trying to contain it;

“The red warning signs started flashing furiously at lunchtime on Friday when the First Minister and her little helpers clambered back up on to their favourite podium in St Andrew’s House and started painting a post-apocalyptic picture of what the country may look like once the new Omicron strain has wheezed its mutations all around us. ‘Trust me, I’m not in the business of trying to scare people,’ implored Nicola Sturgeon as she peered down the camera lense from under the hood of a baggy black cloak, while leaning casually against a glistening, freshly sharpened scythe.”

Had I been working in his office when he handed that affront to decency, that shocking attempt at end of pier comedy in, I might have had to be physically restrained because that’s just disgusting.

That’s just beyond the pale.

That’s the man who this morning showed such crass disregard for the person tasked with taking decisions which could have killed lots of people. I cannot express enough my utter contempt for him.

Back to the article at hand though.

Celtic’s manager handled a tricky situation admirably. As a matter of fact, Rodgers hardly put a foot wrong under heavy questioning even though, in reality, he too was being asked to mount a defence for the indefensible. There is no logical explanation at all for Celtic’s lazy inactivity in the January transfer market and, because of that, nothing Rodgers could say could dampen the flames of hostility which are now ripping through the club’s core support.

All I’m going to note here is that Jackson claims there’s no logical explanation for the lack of spending. It’s there in the paragraph, and believe me we will be returning to that very soon.

Having purred about the size of their bank balance during the club’s recent AGM, they cannot claim that the funds were not available. Nor can they plausibly deny that the need to spend a significant chunk of them ahead of the second half of the season was anything other than blindingly obvious.

As I’ve before when this moron has brought this up, the AGM is when you present the accounts to the shareholders. What were the board supposed to do that day? Offer the annual report without mentioning the numbers? Because that’s all they did.

How could they possibly attempt to claim otherwise when Rodgers himself has spent the last six months sending out distress signals from the dugout with repeated calls to be provided with a greater level of player talent? At the very least Rodgers would have expected to be given enough money to buy himself a bit of reliable cover at left-back, so it simply beggars belief that Celtic’s hierarchy allowed the window to close without being seen to give their manager a helping hand.

No argument. For a moment he appears to have the real target in his sights.

On Saturday at Pittodrie, where Celtic allowed another two league points to slip from their grasp, Rodgers was reduced to sending on Anthony Ralston to fill that problem position, having run out of patience with Alexandro Bernabei after little more than an hour. And not for the first time.

Again, no argument. In fact, Ralston at left back is the most damning indictment of this board that you are likely to find in physical form.

The truth is that Rodgers simply does not believe Bernabei can be relied upon to fill in for the injured Greg Taylor and he’s made that crystal clear since his early days back in the job. There is a major trust issue between the pair which, funnily enough, represents a microcosm of the wider issues engulfing the champions at a critical point in the campaign.

I don’t think it does, but we’ll let that one go for the moment.

Rodgers has been crying out for ‘quality’ all this time but when Celtic had the chance to back their man, all they could muster was yet another winger and a striker who couldn’t hold down a starting place at Norwich. To their credit, Nicolas Kuhn did come off the bench to snatch an equaliser against Aberdeen and Adam Idah also made a decent impression as a second half substitute.

Celtic has quality in the squad. Rodgers has asked for certain characteristics in his signings. Let’s not pretend that this team is a bunch of nobodies, although I know some hacks would like to believe it.

The big No.9 looked powerful and sharp and did enough in half an hour to show why Rodgers was happy enough to sanction his signing, having spotted the 22-year-old’s name on the list provided to him by Celtic’s recruitment team. Rodgers was savvy enough to make that process clear even when he was talking up the last minute loan deal to bring Idah in from the cold at Carrow Road.

Most Celtic fans were savvy enough to realise it without his having to spell it out. Yeah, Rodgers made sure to get the point across. He was saying Idah was the best of a pretty bad lot, and I completely understand why he opted to sign him anyway.

But, in his next breath, the Northern Irishman spoke of a need to convince his own employers to act with more ‘bravery’ in future transfer markets, or at least for ‘as long as I’m at the club,’. In other words, rather than lumping him with four project signings for £3m each in the hope that at least one of them might end up turning a profit, Rodgers would rather they had the courage of their convictions to splash out six, seven or eight million on just one player whose credentials are already beyond question.

Amazing. He worked this out all by himself, eah?

If they do truly trust in the manager’s judgement then why would they not allow him to take some of their money and invest it more wisely? Which brings us back to the crux of the problem at Celtic Park right now. Trust. And the complete lack thereof.

No, the crux of the matter is that the board are inflexible and think they’re always right and can’t possibly be wrong. See, I don’t subscribe to the self-sabotage theory and never have. I think these people are egotistical and incompetent, way out of their depth in a matter they do not understand and never will understand, frozen in place by antiquated thinking and the lack of an original idea amongst the lot of them. It has damn all to do with trust.

Rodgers himself scores low in that particular department, or at least he does with a section of the club’s support who have never fully forgiven him for the betrayal of leaving them for Leicester City almost four years ago. But even some of those hard-line malcontents must have bought into his messaging the other day when he expressed a desire to encourage a change of strategic mindset at board level.

In point of fact, I think that the current scenario is pushing a lot of people towards a rethink of that period of time. I know I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and I know I couldn’t have worked under the kind of conditions he was being asked to tolerate. And the longer these people continue to act the same way towards him as they did then the more that view shifts in his direction.

After all, it was based purely on logic and sound reasoning – the absence of which makes Celtic’s chosen business model so impossible for these same supporters to understand. At the very least, they deserve an explanation.

I think many of us understand it fine. We fundamentally disagree with it and think it pretty lacking in bottle and ambition, but we certainly aren’t struggling with the concept. In fact, this is a classic case of this clown projecting his own ignorance onto the rest of us. It was Jackson himself who said, at the start of this piece, and I quote, “There is no logical explanation at all for Celtic’s lazy inactivity in the January transfer market.” Right there in black and white; no logical explanation. His words, not mine.

So what comes next is not only staggeringly offensive, it’s moon howling stupidity at the same time. It’s the scrapings from the floor in the basement of Ibrox’s darkest fan forum. It’s Jackson wading into the scum swamp, up to his knees in bigoted mud.

If the men in charge of handling Celtic’s financial affairs are quietly squirrelling money away to create a rainy day fund then they should come out and say so. For example, they may have legitimate concerns over the legal ramifications which have been left behind by the monsters who used to prowl around the club’s inner sanctum in their guise as coaches with the boys club.

For a mainstream journalist to invoke that is horrific. I won’t pronounce myself shocked or appalled or anything else. It’s horrific. It’s got no place in any discussion about the club and the club’s transfer policy, and to even write it is a shameless leap into Cimmerian darkness.

If the putrid legacy of these toxic individuals is about to land the current incumbents with a bill for a small fortune then there is nothing to be gained by carrying on and pretending it’s not a real and live issue. Or, if that’s not a genuine concern, then perhaps Celtic may have other plans to spend big on a long overdue refurbishment of the dilapidated and dreary main stand at Parkhead, potentially running into the tens of millions.

This is the bizarre and sickening fantasy a lot of folk close to Ibrox have long clung to; that this will wash away Celtic as cheating the tax man and running up massive debts destroyed Rangers. It’s as if there aren’t real people involved in this, it’s as if there aren’t complex issues of law involved in this. These people don’t care about any of it. It’s either a weapon to be used or rancid gossip, just idle speculation to be thrown around the public square by degenerates and idiots.

I’ve been careful on this because of the gravity of it, but I have written about this subject, hopefully in a measured and responsible way, and I’ve examined the law and the likely implications of what might happen next and 99% of the speculation is miles off base and it always has been. For the record though, I can pretty much offer an assurance that such chatter is nowhere near the mark and it’s this; if this was the case it would be in the accounts under what’s known as a “contingent liability” and if it was in there, I’m very sure someone would have spotted it by now.

Of course, this doesn’t stop moronic individuals from bringing this up, even people who are smarter than the average tabloid hate-monger. A case in point is former SPL CEO Roger Mitchell who is nothing if not an attention whore. He raised the same point on Twitter today and then swiftly deleted the post after getting the predictable stick for it, which I reckon is a cowardly act having stirred the shit with a big whisk just to get a response, which he then didn’t like.

The Celtic Star covered Mitchell and Jackson in an excellent article which I heartily commend. You can read it clicking on this link right here.

But to return to Jackson and his big sign off …

Whatever the rationale behind it, they owe it to themselves and, more importantly, to their supporters to come up with a plausible explanation for this lack of ambition and creativity in the transfer market. The fans might not like what they hear or even agree with the thought behind it. But, at the very least, they might be better able to understand. And only then will they begin to give their trust again.

Three things from that.

First, it’s amazing that a writer at a newspaper which has spent years doling out propaganda and lies thinks it can dare lecture anyone on trust.

Secondly, having offered the lunatic theory he’s back to claiming there’s no “plausible” explanation for the policy … which presumably is why he offered such a deranged one.

And lastly, as I’ve said, fans are not as daft as this eejit evidently thinks and we do understand the policy, and because this board is wedded to in its arrogance there’s no rebuilding trust or any sort of productive relationship, because that ship has sailed and until major changes are made at the top of our house there’ll be no more benefit of the doubt.

You know, I limit myself on here to critiquing Jackson as a writer and a journalist. But it’s instructive to remember every now and again some of the things he’s written over the years which go far beyond simply commenting on the football.

It’s instructive to remember what a horror of a human being he is at times, and whether it’s slagging a hard-working public servant for feeling the emotional strain of taking life and death decisions or if its dredging up child abuse to make a point, or, if you want to go back further, xenophobic garbage about Morelos and cocaine because he’s a Colombian national, we are reminded that underneath that crap writing lies the swamp dredger, the gutter dweller, the scumbag.