The Cantwell-O’Riley comparisons were always stupid. No wonder Celtic fans have mocked them.

If reports from across the city are to be believed, “Tik-Tok Todd” Cantwell will be leaving Ibrox soon for a transfer fee so low it would barely buy a loaf of bread and a pint of milk.

Hey, that’s inflation for you!

But seriously, the word around the campfire is that they want him gone for virtually nothing. What a stunning denouement for everyone who was involved in hyping that guy over the last few years.

One of the things I talk about a lot on here is how few people in the Scottish sports media actually understand the game they watch. They seem to believe that because a player does a couple of fancy tricks in a match, he’s had a stormer and proven his quality. But I liken that to watching a dad do tricks with his kids down the park. Real players produce the goods consistently, and they do it in ways that can be measured in hard numbers.

Cantwell has never put those kinds of numbers on the board. He’s never produced with any type of consistency. He can do the odd trick and the odd flick, but sometimes you just want your footballers to do the simple stuff.

I thought there was a period last season where we were guilty, at times, of trying to walk the ball into the net. It was only when we stopped that and started playing a more straightforward, direct game that things really took off. And as we’ve watched this season, everything is on the front foot; there are no over-elaborate aberrations.

Cantwell always struck me as a lazy player, one of those guys who thinks a few fancy flicks are a substitute for the drive and energy that separates really good players from the mediocre.

Look at any top-class footballer, especially in midfield, and these guys do a power of work. If they’re not doing it on the ball, they’re doing it off the ball. They’re giving their markers and defenders nightmares. It’s constant movement. They’re always on the lookout for space and opportunity. I never saw that in Cantwell when I watched him play. There were moments when, on the ball, he looked like he had something, but most of the time he spent wandering around in a semi-daze, doubtless thinking about his next hair appointment.

Nobody can watch this guy and think he belongs in the top bracket.

Recently, when the ex-Ibrox boss Michael Beale spoke to the press about Cantwell, he confirmed what some suspected at the time but which the media was at great pains to ignore: that Cantwell arrived at Ibrox on a free because Norwich couldn’t wait to get him off the wage bill. It’s the same situation now, this time at Ibrox, where they badly need to free up some cash and are willing to cut him loose if someone assumes his salary.

There is no mystery as to what happened here.

Cantwell may have a certain level of skill, but he lacks so many of the other qualities necessary to be a top football player. Rodgers is one of the people who has said over and over again that talent is not enough. It’s hard to argue that Cantwell possesses vast amounts of that, but even if he did, he’s dragged down by his weaknesses in so many other areas, including an almost absurd inability to simply focus on the game in order to be better at it.

This is the genesis of the nickname “Tik-Tok Todd,” as applied to him by Chris Sutton when, for reasons beyond understanding, Cantwell decided that the best use of his time was to get into an argument with the journalist and broadcaster.

It was an incredibly stupid thing to do.

For all that, this guy was a “superstar,” according to the media and a lot of Ibrox fans who simply do not know how to analyse football or football players. Cantwell wouldn’t have gotten near a Celtic team under either Brendan Rodgers or Ange Postecoglou. He wouldn’t even have made our subs bench. Rodgers, in particular, would have found himself immensely frustrated trying to get a tune out of this guy—not that he would have done it for very long.

What astonishes me, even now, is that even when all this is known, even when people in the media accept that Cantwell isn’t a top-bracket footballer, and even when people in the Ibrox support are desperate to see him leave—even if it’s on a free—there are still people who push the fantasy that something has obviously gone wrong at Ibrox, and that’s the reason why he’s flopped.

We don’t call Kris Boyd the village idiot on this site for nothing. His contention the other day, that if only Cantwell had screwed the nut and if only things at Ibrox had been better, and he’d had a manager who believed in him, they could have had their very own Matt O’Riley—a player worth an eight-figure sum of money—is so ludicrous that it should disqualify Boyd from ever again being considered for punditry.

If reports today are true, Cantwell is headed for Blackburn on that modest transfer fee. That’s only the next step on his downward career spiral, because I can’t see any indication that he’s a footballer worth any club spending an extended amount of time on.

You wait and see—when he finally gets his move, everything that he says will seek to blame someone else. And some of that, by the way, will be true, because the way Clement has treated him has been pretty abysmal.

But the simple fact is he is his own worst enemy. His biggest problem is that he believes his own hype. He thinks he’s better than he is, and that means he doesn’t work as hard as he should or focus as much as he needs to.

And it’s why O’Riley, who is now in the English top flight after a massive fee and a huge vote of confidence in his future, emerged as the vastly better player. Cantwell will never get near that, no matter what his gushing media fan-boys think. He is the proof of just how little about football these people actually know.