The Record Made A Big Mistake In Letting Henning Berg Bad-Mouth Celtic Yesterday.

The Record really does love to dredge up rubbish from ex-Ibrox players with a gripe against us, but in the run-up to their game against Manchester Utd at Murrayfield today (they lost 2-0, and the social media reception to the performance is toxic) they interviewed Henning Berg, and he said he wouldn’t attend the game because of bad memories of Murrayfield.

He was referring to the Legia Warsaw debacle, when a hapless Ronny Deila run side lost 6-1 on aggregate to a team managed by Berg. It’s worth noting that Deila’s team was sent into that game without having made a single first team signing … a shameful indictment on people who are this club, and in senior positions, right now.

And yet there was a sting in the tail for Berg and his side. During the second leg at Murrayfield, where they won 2-0, they brought on a player with four minutes left. His name was Bartosz Bereszynski, and he was under suspension at the time. In the aftermath the media here went nuts, the Polish club went nut and very few people spoke the simple truth that they had broken the rules and the punishment for that was nailed down.

I found the whingeing, both then and now, to be utterly absurd. We were dreadful in those games but our reinstatement was completely justified. What else can you say? The rule-breaking was stupid to say the least, especially when we’d already been re-instated to a European competition not long before when Sion fielded ineligible players and were kicked out.

Every club in Europe has a responsibility to check that it is on the level before the games kick off. If you make a mistake its on your own head, and everyone knows what the consequences are. Their pleas in mitigation were just a waste of everyone’s time. The Scottish media’s disgust at us for “taking advantage” of the rules was absolutely pathetic.

And it’s still pathetic. It’s pathetic that Berg is still moaning about this, and it’s pretty stupid of our media to be highlighting a decade old gripe when Celtic was completely in the right and fully entitled to accept the verdict. But it’s stupid for another reason as well.

It’s stupid because any time this subject come up, the media is in effect reminding us of how UEFA’s regulations are vastly more robust than those at the SFA. They are reminding us about the EBT years and how they essentially went unpunished. They are reminding us that this is a banana republic of football, one where the press doesn’t think the rules should apply, one where they openly express their contempt for regulations … but only when that suits certain clubs.

It was a lamentable piece, and that The Daily Record thought to run it shows how poor they are right now. It’s not as bad as, for example, writing an obvious nonsense like the Morgan Whittaker piece which appeared today, but it’s not great either.

It’s desperate and daft in that it makes Berg sound like a bitter clown who still can’t accept that the correct decision was made, and it casts that big light again on Hampden and why they didn’t take similar action in 2012 when the Lord Nimmo Smith case was set up, but with a side-letter guarantee that the rules would not be enforced.

That’s an episode all of Scottish football would rather we forgot, and we won’t, whether they remind us about it or not. I just think it’s pretty stupid that they do.