The Mail’s Resident Clown Insults The Celtic Fans Again Even As He Crawls On Bended Knees For Ibrox.

This will be the first time I’ve ever done this. This will be the first time I’ve ever given one of Jackson’s colleagues at The Record/Sunday Mail the Jackson treatment, and you know why? Because for all some of them irritate me they are simply not worth it.

Jackson is the top guy at Record Sport and that makes his head worthy of mounting on the wall.

t’s not a mark of respect that I leave the rest of them alone and never subject them to this unless the piece itself falls to a certain level below something you’d scrape swiftly off the bottom of your shoe with a stick. Jackson’s job is all the justification I need.

The Ancient Embarrassment at The Sunday Mail is probably the person at those two titles who is least worthy of my time and attention in the Jackson manner. But today he earned it because his piece today does meet the standards which qualify it for an exception.

As bad as most of his work is, today’s piece truly found bottom. And so here we are.

Let’s start with the headline.

“I didn’t dare spin Celtic triumph over Rangers the other way because this old city is built on prevention – Hugh Keevins”

That’s nothing but mumbo-jumbo. Did his editor approve that just so that real writers could mock him mercilessly for it? What does that even mean? You know, at a time when we’re talking about the most powerful man in the world and his mental acuity, isn’t it past time that those who run that paper sent this doddering, fossilised relic into his own retirement?

The sub-headline makes that an even more obvious question.

“It is what you prevent the other lot from getting that is more important than what you win for yourself in this old city”

Absolute bollocks. There is not one single Celtic supporter who thinks that way. Not one. Not a single one. As this blog has written many times before, and as other sites have likewise said over and over again, Celtic fans are concerned about our success first and foremost. We celebrate our triumphs for what they mean to us. We couldn’t give a shit what those triumphs mean elsewhere.

Let’s get to the article itself. Thankfully, it’s mercifully short.

“Last Wednesday was the 27th anniversary of Wim Jansen being appointed Celtic manager.”

Yep and even if this clown doesn’t remember the media’s staggeringly negative response to that, I do. I particularly remember that Keevins was in a foot-stamping rage over it because he had stated that someone else had gotten the job. Yet another example of this eejit being embarrassingly wrong. His whole career is full of that stuff. He scorned the Jansen appointment in the most savage language, which even then had a tint of xenophobia about it.

“The Dutchman went on to enter club folklore by stopping Rangers’ 10 in a row on the last day of the season in May 1998. You’ll notice I said Wim stopped Rangers from achieving what would have been an historic win. I didn’t spin it the other way and say he won Celtic their first championship for 10 years, an equally impressive statistic. Because that’s not how it works for the fans of both Glasgow clubs. Is it?”

Preventing ten in a row was important. No question. But you know what? I didn’t celebrate that day because it stopped ten in a row.

I celebrated Celtic winning a title, the first for a decade, the proof that my club – my club, not some other club – had risen from the ashes of a truly terrible period and re-asserted itself at the top of the game.

It was the proof that the Fergus McCann revolution was complete, and that between the little Canadian with the bunnet and ourselves we, all of us, had rebuilt Celtic and made it champions. The pride I felt that day looking around the completed Celtic Park … that had very, very little to do with the club across town.

“It is what you prevent the other lot from getting that is more important than what you win for yourself, apparently. And that’s why Celtic must sign Adam Idah and others in the coming week – or the rumbling will start among those given to premature panic. (Ibrox’s) inability to arrange delivery of steel from Asia to complete rebuilding at Ibrox in time for the start of the new season is an irrelevance. A source of embarrassment, for certain, but not an inconvenience if temporary housing is secured at Hampden.”

As discussed, the first part of that paragraph is a red-faced nonsense which proves that this joker has not got the first clue what motivates our support, and that’s strange considering the number of people who constantly tell me that he’s “one of our own.” Not in this lifetime. He still thinks that the dwindling number of listeners on that hellish radio show he takes part in reflects the wide body of the Celtic fanbase. It does not. It never has. I lose IQ points just listening to it.

Celtic needs to sign players in the coming weeks because the season starts in four. It has nothing to do with stopping a panic. It’s to do with being as prepared for the season as we can be. That’s it, it’s that simple. Celtic needs to get a move on or we’re placing ourselves in unnecessary danger. It has nothing to do with stopping panic.

Which brings me to the third part of the paragraph, the gutless, fraudulent, cowardly, servile and crawling part of it, the section which seeks to dismisses the enormous, and growing, Ibrox crisis as a mere irrelevance of no consequence.

That’s a preposterous thing to write, and reading that I can’t not think of Joe Biden standing at the lectern last week looking for the words that had fallen out of his head and like marbles rolled across the CNN debate stage floor. Only a complete moron would have written, or could possibly believe, that the Ibrox club is not in the midst of a very serious crisis.

The simple fact is that he does not want to criticise them for making such a monumental mess.

Keevins is spineless. Keevins has the backbone of a jelly-fish, and even when every person in the country knows that they are in deep trouble he doesn’t have the guts to say it. But you know, few of his colleagues have actually explored this in detail … but they do all know serious it is. He is denying that it’s serious, and that puts him in a class of his own and that’s the reason I undertook this article. Because that takes stupidity to Homer Simpson proportions.

“ The only people who will get grief will be SFA president Mike Mulraney and chief executive Ian Maxwell. They will be accused of facilitating (Ibrox’s)’ move rather than punishing the club for the disruption of the fixture list. It’s a spurious allegation on the basis Hampden represents no form of upheaval. But Scottish football occasionally likes to dedicate itself to the task of getting somebody – anybody – into bother.”

 I could not care less where they play their games. As long as the SFA gets good money for the use of Hampden and that money is distributed to the rest of the clubs in a fair way, then it’s all good. They won’t have “facilitated” anything. They’ll have spotted an opportunity for Scottish football to benefit from Ibrox’s misfortune and they will have seized it. There is one group of people who will stamp their feet and react in fury if those games end up at Hampden … the Ibrox fans.

“And that brings me back to the lack of signings so far made by Celtic. Pre-season training has resumed and the team’s America trip is days away. Some suggest that boss Brendan Rodgers’ targets are with countries still involved at Euro 2024. It seems a fanciful notion. Transfer fees and wages of these players would be incompatible with a scale of investment willing to be made by a Scottish club”.

If Celtic signs a player who was at the Euros, I look forward to the acknowledgement that he was wrong.

This is a mark of Keevins’ complete ignorance, of course. Some of the players at the Euros were out of contract. Others were not wanted by their clubs. Others still play at clubs where the money isn’t great and a decent transfer fee would shift them.

If he means literally still at the Euros – England, Holland, France and Spain – his narrative is dishonest as that doesn’t reflect what those people meant at the time. Celtic may well sign at least one player who was at that competition. It would not surprise me in the slightest if they did.

“Even Celtic’s bank account, which is huge by domestic standards, is minuscule where the wider world is concerned. The real problem is (Ibrox) have signed a raft of players and Celtic have been static in comparison. It’s nothing compared to the chaos that Jansen inherited back in 1997. Then he signed a player called Henrik Larsson – and the rest is history.”

Celtic fans could not care less what is going on across the city in terms of signings.

Whatever else we have on our minds right now, we are not in the least bit troubled by the influx of freebies from the SPFL and the complete unknowns from around the world being assembled at Ibrox as if some first-time Football Manager player was building his team at random. If Hibs or Hearts had signed these players no-one would bat an eyelid. That’s how concerned most of us are.

Again, this is classic Keevins rubbish.

We are interested only in what happens at our own club. That’s it. Nothing else. We have a season to build for, Champions League games to prepare for and it seems to many like the Usual Suspects at Parkhead are dragging their feet. Once we get our act together we’ll demonstrate how puny the Ibrox signing strategy is.

“There might not be a signing as iconic as the Swede in the pipeline. But he’s the perfect example that sometimes good things come to those who wait.”

A flat-line ending to an article which is dire beyond belief. Larsson was iconic. Keevins was amongst the people who dismissed it as an irrelevance just as he did later on when Dr Jo Venglos signed Lubo Moravcik, the most talented footballer to play in Scotland in my lifetime.

He can gloss over the parts of the history that embarrass him as he likes … some of us remember.