David Tanner Needs An Education On The Reality Of Celtic’s Title Victory. He’s Bitter And Clueless.

2003 is a year which has a lot of memories for me, some of them good and some of them bad. The bad ones all involved politics. It was the year of the invasion of Iraq, and so I started that year as a Labour activist and I ended it without a political home.

I also ended it in a weird situation; alone over the holidays in silent student digs. Everyone on my floor was away. Aside from being back home in Glasgow for Christmas and New Year, I spent a lot of that university break skint, on my own, staring at four walls.

Two things kept me relatively grounded; the radio and Football Manager.

Being a blogger is a bit of a lonely business. You spend all day on your own, sitting in front of the computer. Other people have offices. Conference calls. Workplaces to go to. Canteens to sit in. People around them. We don’t get that, and you can go a bit mad with all that time to yourself. How I fill silence now from the way I did it during that long university winter break up in Stirling isn’t that much different except in the choice of media.

Podcasts are my thing, and the irony of that is that they usually involve politics. Back then, I actually spent my days listening to TalkSport. I thought it had some interesting guests and some interesting conversations. I wasn’t really big on the radio before then, except to listen to games at the weekend, before every away match was on Sky and every home game could be found on some streaming site or another. But that winter, TalkSport kept me sane and it’s fair to say that I listened to a lot of it over the next few years, whenever I wanted some background noise.

At what point did that change?

The minute I realised what TalkSport was; the station that plays in the clown car. When did that happen? Not terribly long ago, I don’t think, maybe eight or nine years back? I don’t remember the date, but I do remember the moment, the one where I mentally tuned out, and although I’ve heard some of their content since I’ve never actually deliberately gone seeking that station; it was one morning when they deigned to discuss Scottish football.

How many times had they done that before and I’d just not heard it? I have no idea. But I remember this moment vividly because in order to contextualise what they were talking about they had in the studio the man they described as their “expert north of the border.”

Do you know what his name was? It was Keith Jackson.

And their “understanding” of Scottish football has only gotten more cartoonish as time has gone by, and in spite of it being the dumbest of dumbed down nonsense – just as I’ve come to realise that much of TalkSport is, with its focus on the “shock-jocks” competing to see who can sound the most ignorant and ridiculous – incredibly much of it winds up in our papers.

It is ghastly. Even the most idiotic trash, much of it viciously anti Scottish, is parroted by our media as if it was wisdom. It is the pits. It is the lowest of the low. There are times when it even makes Radio Clyde sound professional and its anchors reasonably intelligent.

On a show where the likes of Simon Jordan proliferate and where Jim White is considered an icon of broadcasting, it should not surprise me that they’ve finally scraped the gunk off the bottom of the barrel and come to David Tanner as their “Scottish correspondent” and I am grateful to my friend at Born Celtic for highlighting his ludicrous take on our season.

Of course, it is mindless guff. He starts off by saying that Rodgers early critics were all amongst the fans; I think some in the media have told themselves this lie until they believe it. Others simply do not want to acknowledge that they had written him off and are desperately scrambling to touch the helm of his toga now that he’s the emperor again. It is pathetic watching them try to ingratiate themselves to a guy they’ve spent eight months insulting.

Every Celtic manager has to fight to earn the respect of these people, whereas an Ibrox boss just breezes in the door and has them eating out of his hand. But when the manager in question has competed for seven trophies and won every one of them, he has earned some basic courtesy even if they don’t mean it. His record now is nine trophies out of ten … he has more than proved he is worth it, and he has made absolute mugs out of them.

In his bitchy bitterness Tanner talks about the “militant section” of the Celtic support who turned on Rodgers after he left. Let’s get this right. That wasn’t a “militant section” but virtually the entirety of our fan-base, and it wasn’t that he left it was the manner in which it was done. But as per usual it suits the narrative of these clowns to pretend that it was some kind of extreme reaction. It wasn’t. It was a perfectly valid response to what was a dreadful departure, midway through a campaign, with a ton of work still remaining to be done.

But see, it’s precisely because it was a perfectly reasonable response, and perfectly reasonable anger, that enabled many of us to behave in a perfectly reasonable way about the prospect of his return. Speaking for myself, it took Ange’s decision to go, and the mercenary way he handled it, to clear the mental decks of any suggestion that we should be looking for someone to pledge lifelong loyalty. If all that’s left is a mercenary, then you should be looking to bring in the best one you can get and nobody scored higher on that chart than Rodgers.

Tanner continues to talk absolute rubbish, such as with his contention that the Ibrox club could, and should, have won the league but they “bottled it.”

This is just part of the same old refusal to accept what actually happened, and an effort to suggest that it was the defeat at Ross County and the draw against Dundee which cost them. Nowhere in that narrative is there an ounce of credit for Celtic, but in fact, our run towards the end was so outstanding that even had they won both of those games we would have been champions, and that’s the truth and anyone who tries to infer otherwise is only really lying to themselves, and those too ignorant to use a calculator.

He talks briefly about the prospect of Rodgers returning to England; the man has committed himself to the totality of his three-year deal and I don’t believe for one minute that he will leave before that contract expires, and this time next year we’ll have a very real decision to make about offering him an extension to it and he’ll have to decide whether to sign it. Whatever he chooses to do, he will do with the goodwill of the support, and we will move forward.

Tanner’s whole attitude betrays his biases but it shines through most when he talks about the fans and then about Adam Idah, making the hysterical claim that his late goal at Ibrox “ensured we got a point”, which is one of the most ludicrous statements of the season. That goal should have got us three points, three points which we absolutely deserved that day. His contention that Idah, therefore, scored “the two most important goals” of our season is also debatable at best, and especially as he means those two particular ones as though the late goals at Motherwell and elsewhere didn’t matter half as much, when they actually did.

He then pushes some of the transparent Ibrox guff about how they’ll do a massive rebuild by selling Butland (I wrote the other night about why that might be wishful thinking in the Joe Hart piece) and punting Tavernier and Goldson “to the Saudis” which has become the new catchall for any player they want to offload over there; “Gerrard might want to team up with them again …” three years older, slower and not improved one bit.

What followed was basically surreal; the English anchor (not Jeff Sterling, who presented this deranged segment in a proper example of what a career comedown looks like) suggested that Tavernier has had another “excellent season” … which goes to show how little of Scottish football he’s actually watched, and gives you a flavour of the “expert opinions” they listen to from up here, as if having Tanner on the show wasn’t revealing enough.

The suggestion that there might be “other interest” in him sounded so absurd that even Tanner wasn’t prepared to go along with it. “The one disappointment with James Tavernier this season has been defensively,” he said, with an audible sigh after a long pause. Which is to put it mildly. That has been the “disappointment” with him every year he’s been at Ibrox where in spite of his penalty taking ability, he has not been the subject of a single concrete offer from elsewhere. Not one. Not ever. Not at any point from any other club.

Was TalkSport always like this? Even back in the day, when I spent an entire winter break listening to it as the last person left on my floor in student halls? Having Tanner on there must make the Keith Jackson years sound like the high-water mark of quality. I know that this is a definite low point, but I also know that if the journey from Jackson has led them here that the overall standards are only going one way and there might yet be room beneath the bottom.

If there is, I believe they will find it.