The McGregor Rumour Is Disquieting Because Celtic’s Season Has Had That Kind Of Luck.

Over the weekend, The Daily Record apparently ran a claim that Callum McGregor will be out for the rest of the season. I know this because a couple of the Celtic fan media sites ran stories linking to The Record piece in which this claim was made.

Oddly enough, that claim was not in those articles when I clicked on the link to see for myself, in an effort to find out where this lurid piece of speculation had come from. Speculation is all the rage right now around our club.

I saw one headline yesterday morning that claimed Rodgers would definitely not be at Celtic next season and that the decision has already been made. I know no more than that, because I didn’t bother to click on the report, which not a single outlet anywhere has bothered with, a sure sign that something is made up nonsense since our lazy media will almost always pick up and run with any story no matter how daft it might prove to be.

Not one other outlet in the mainstream press has run the Callum McGregor story. Not one. On top of that, the story itself, where the claim was made, seems to have been edited and the claim removed from it. Which doesn’t mean that it’s not true; there was no speculation beyond what was on the blogs about Mark Lawwell quitting, but we know now that early rumours about him turned out to be absolutely on the money. Is that the case here?

Well Brendan Rodgers has explicitly said that the club doesn’t know what the situation is with McGregor. We’re waiting on certain results because the scans which were originally supposed to give us the answers were inconclusive. Rodgers seems fairly sure he’ll be back after the international break though, and that should give us some hope.

That’s the “official” story anyway. But still, that Record report, which obviously existed since people published links to it … it niggles at me because it had to come from somewhere.

So, was it just a hack taking a wild punt? Someone misspeaking? A misunderstanding which made it into print, or was it someone at the club talking out of class about something that nobody is ready to spill to the rest of us yet? I am not ready to make a call on that.

I hope Rodgers is not just being coy, protecting both the player and the club from a staggering piece of bad news. I hope that McGregor really is only facing a short spell on the sidelines, to return prior to Ibrox and to give us the best possible chance of victory.

But I’m disquieted by this, and I am not going to feel better about it until we know more about McGregor’s injury and what the likely recovery timeline is. Even then, I think it’s going to take seeing his name on the team-sheet to really make me believe it. That’s what this season has done to me, folks, it’s what this season has done to us all.