The Ancient Embarrassment Is Trying Again To Fool All Of The Peepul All Of The Time.

There are a handful of requirements for an opinion writer which are non-negotiable.

The most important of them is this; you are allowed to change your mind, but you cannot brazen your way out of that by pretending you never held your previous views. Even the stupidest opinion writer knows that a lot of people keep archives and even more have long memories.

Changing your mind is good. It’s a sign of that you are tuned in, switched on … and that you are willing to take on board new information and re-evaluate. “When the facts change, I change my mind,” is Samuelson’s famous quote.

Sometimes, opinion writers just get it plain wrong.

Take my initial articles on Ange Postecoglou; I got one thing right in those, that the appointment was a desperate, last-minute risk everything gamble we should never have needed to make. But in terms of the predictions that he would be a disaster, they were miles off the mark.

And it didn’t take me long to realise it.

Indeed, I knew it before a ball was kicked in that campaign. If you read back to that time, you’ll see that even as we were struggling through those early away fixtures that I was euphoric over the kind of football we were trying to play.

It wasn’t even some blinding new unearthed fact that convinced me we had the right guy; it was the man himself. His calm, his composure, his unshakable self-belief. I read his book. I watched his interviews. I tuned in to every news story, and I even got to meet him and see him up close.

But I never pretended not to have written any of the things that I had. That would have been an insult to every single person who read those articles at the time, whether they agreed with them or not. You need to own a mistake like that. You need to live with it.

People will be throwing that one in my face until I’m on my deathbed, along with the even dafter criticism – thankfully confined to Twitter and never put down on this site – that those who thought it was acceptable to have a J League manager would probably accept J League players … yeah, that one isn’t going in my Greatest Hits.

A handful of opinion writers have tried to bullshit their way out of the daft things they’ve written by submitting contradictory pieces later on and trying to act as if they had never done any such thing. All of them deserve to be called out on it.

One of them – and he’s been caught doing this many, many times – is Hugh Keevins, AKA The Ancient Embarrassment, at The Sunday Mail, and he’s at it again today with his piece slagging his own readers and the audience of his own radio show for being “in denial” about the state of the crisis at Ibrox, and the complete shambles they’ve gotten into.

But Keevins is the very same guy who was denying that any such shambles, any such crisis, existed not a month ago, and I wrote about that at the time. His casual dismissal of the importance of their losing their home ground for an indefinite period of time and having to play elsewhere was perhaps the single most ridiculous thing I’ve read this year and I’ve read a handful of editorials from The American Conservative in that time.

His piece on the Ibrox club today is scathing, his second in a fortnight, but flatly and blatantly contradicts that which he was writing just a few weeks before. This isn’t a hack getting something wrong and owning up to it. Nor is he a hack trying desperately to move on from a mistake. No, when you are slagging your own listeners and readers for the beliefs they hold you better be damned sure that you are not on the record holding similar views.

And he is. And that’s the difference. That’s why he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this. Any neutral could tell that they were a shambles when the story about the stadium broke. He was the one who dismissed crisis talk although the makeup of the team was much as it is right now, the loss of experienced players was at the same level as right now and the mood music coming out of the club was of how they would need to sell in order to buy.

Don’t get me wrong, it gladdens my heart to see Ibrox in the firing line, and especially seeing their manager get some much needed scrutiny. But Keevins was one of the most sycophantic out of all of them, and I can embarrass him simply by reading back some of his own coverage to him.

Few writers were so happy to crawl and kiss the helm of Clement’s toga.

In the end, of course, all had to bow before Rodgers, and I knew that some of them would become part of the Brendan Cult overnight as a result. This joker is one of them, and you know what they say about a convert; there’s no zealot quite like him.

The Clement re-evaluation is welcome, but it’s also a bit nauseating.

The sudden switch to “Ibrox in crisis” mode catches up with the rest of us, yeah, and about time too … but it’s too much to stomach when people pretend not to have held their previous views when in fact, we know that they did and can prove it simply by doing a little Googling.

The thing that makes Keevins different, and always has, is that he is a smug, patronising sod who has always viewed his audience with vast contempt, and this is in spite of being an absolute fool, with a career of expressing fraudulent opinions on players and managers about whom he knows nothing and whose audience has exposed him as such again and again and again.

Keevins is an idiot. That’s the fact of it. His knowledge is only surface deep and that’s if we’re being kind to him, and back when there was no internet and no global TV footage and no way of being able to do a deep dive on players that might have been excusable – it wasn’t, as those in the game and who know their stuff have always been willing to share their knowledge with anyone who wants a piece of information on a player or a club – but in the modern era its unforgiveable.

He’s been caught out on this again and again, to a humiliating degree.

When you put his contempt for the audience in a context like that, it’s embarrassing.

As someone who reads a lot of political media I can tell you that people with Keevins’ attitude are not unheard of.

There are a handful of writers who don’t hide that they believe the bulk of their audience is stupid. The one who comes automatically to mind is Peter Hitchens. He always thinks he’s the smartest guy in any room. He has openly expressed the view that most of the people who read his newspapers are idiots – but then he thinks the same about almost every politician he’s ever met, and most of those in his own business as well.

But the thing about Hitchens is that he can back it up.

He usually is the smartest guy in any room.

He writes for right-wing newspapers, like The Daily Mail, whose average reader is easily swayed by emotional nonsense and rhetoric.

Keevins is patronising an audience which, by and large, is much, much smarter than he is on the subject he’s paid to cover and that’s not tenable, and is part of why that rag he writes for is dying on its arse.