The Celtic Boss Has Been Shelled All Season. He’ll Cope With The Latest Desperate Flea Bite.

It never ends, does it? The Brendan Bashing continues, and today from an unlikely source; a former CEO at Aberdeen, Keith Wyness, a name so lost in the annals of time and Scottish football history that I had to Google it and still I’m none the wiser. Why’s he having a go at Rodgers and does any of what came out of his mouth make sense?

Well, his comments are basically pretty daft for the most part, but the reasons why he’s having a blast at our manager are easy enough to understand; every attention seeker with the flimsiest connection to Scottish football knows that attacking Rodgers, especially in such an unhinged and unprovoked fashion as this, gets you in the papers.

Brendan Rodgers must go to bed every night and get up again every morning wondering if it’s ever going to stop, and the answer is obvious; of course not, not as long as he’s at Celtic Park. This will go on and on and on until the day he departs this club.

Wyness was being interviewed by the notorious clickbait site Football Insider, which always seems to find these characters at the bottom of the barrel. There honestly cannot be a worse website covering the game in Scotland today; that so many mainstream titles actually nick stories from there as if it was an informative source and not just a scourge on our sporting landscape is dreadful. They seem to generate an awful lot of traffic from stuff that plainly isn’t true.

The rest of it, they generate from interviewing people like Wyness, long forgotten by most of the game and not missed by anybody. We need to hear from Keith Wyness? We need to hear about his views on Brendan Rodgers? Yeah? For what possible reason? What does he bring to the debate? Knowledge? Wisdom? Or just another daft, uninformed opinion which, let’s face it, you could get just going onto Twitter or taking a walk down to the pub.

And what are these pearls of wisdom? That Rodgers doesn’t seem happy. That there are obviously things wrong at the club. That he might not be here in “one or two seasons” even if we win the league this time around. Amazing. He worked that stuff out all by himself, did he? And there I thought we were stuck today relying on Andy Walker for that level of insight. Walker at least talks as someone who understands the full context of what’s going on.

Wyness says he doesn’t feel sympathy for Rodgers. Again, that doesn’t exactly put him in elite company, but then he’s not exactly an elite level guy. The hacks who have taken this story onward recall that he was the CEO of Aberdeen from 2000-04; the glory years, eah? Well, not exactly. Those years include finishing 8th and 11th in the league. Needless to say, there were no trophies to be had, just a bunch of quarter final places, which is the bare minimum fans should expect at a club like Aberdeen. No-one there will remember him fondly.

These are the people that dire website seeks out. They are what allows it to lie to itself about having some insider knowledge of the game. Knowing people on its periphery doesn’t make you an expert. Knowing a guy who cleaned up around Los Alamos wouldn’t have put you insider the Manhattan Project at the end of the day, right?

Rodgers must be tired of all this, but I suspect he’s never going to get tired enough of it to leave as a result. No, what this will do is it will fill him with an even greater determination to succeed, to push himself to even greater limits in his quest to make this team better and thus settle all these outstanding debts. He’s too good not to get fired up by this.

Because really, that’s the only way for someone like Rodgers to answer his critics; to confront them with the stupidity of their own misjudgements, to make them recognise his greatness, to add to his trophy haul and to make them cover the victory party, and if they aren’t able to do that then to at least acknowledge it, and his talents, at the same time.

I’ll tell you this much though; Rodgers has been under such constant bombardment all season long that crap like this much register as nothing more than a flea bite to him. He’s coped with the heavy artillery. I am sure he’s not going to lose any sleep over this.