The Record can slag Sky if it wants, but the whole sports media overhyped Ibrox’s fallen “star.”

Earlier today, I wrote an article on Todd Cantwell and those, like Barry Ferguson, who have claimed that he could have been a Matt O’Riley.

I talked about how the worst culprits were among the Scottish media who hyped this guy to the heavens and couldn’t seem to help themselves even after it became apparent that he wasn’t half as good a player as they’d made him out to be.

I was perfectly happy to leave that story where it stood. Then, this afternoon, someone sent me a piece from the Daily Record which openly mocked a Sky Sports Scotland story from about two years ago, which hyped Cantwell as a £50 million player.

I 100% agree that it’s a preposterous story, a piece of not just bad journalism but something dragged up from the bottom drawer.

But what makes it funny to me, and the reason I’m bringing this subject up again, is that both the Daily Record and The Sun—and a host of Ibrox fan sites—were saying the exact same thing at the time. In fact, some of them were pushing equally mad stories on the day Cantwell signed for the club.

The genesis of all this appears to be a series of tales from 2021, where clubs were said to be interested and all sorts of mad numbers were being offered as potential fees.

I remember much excitement when Cantwell signed, and that story, and others, were being taken seriously by the mainstream media here. I remember it like it was yesterday. Ibrox fan websites were widely quoting that story, as were mainstream media outlets who were convinced that they’d signed a superstar. So pulling Sky up for it is hypocritical, if we’re being generous—although the valuation originated with Sky in the first place, so they do deserve criticism.

Todd Cantwell was never, at any time, a player who anyone serious valued in that bracket. Never. It simply wasn’t the case. But I suspect Cantwell had some good PR people working with him, even if his agents could never turn that hype into actual interest from credible football clubs.

As I said earlier, we now know that when Cantwell signed for the Ibrox club, it was on a free transfer, and only then because The Mooch, Michael Beale, had previously coached him and thought there was a player there—which is all the reason you’ll ever need to dismiss Michael Beale as having a promising future in management.

But it’s obvious when you read people’s comments that Cantwell was never seriously rated by anyone outside a small cadre who thought they could get a tune out of him. The fact that he was available by that time for free and no one but Ibrox came in for him—and that only on the basis of Beale’s recommendation—tells you how serious that valuation ever was in the first place.

Yet our unserious and amateurish media did swallow that story whole and propagated it at the time. For a long while after, they appeared to be waiting for the “talent” to emerge which justified it; go back and read some of the coverage for yourself.

I mean, one astonishing story was in The Sun in the day before Cantwell signed, where one of their reporters made the unbelievable claim that Blackburn had made a £15 million offer for him just weeks before, and that Norwich had turned it down.

Quite how he got from the club turning down a £15 million offer to the guy being about to sign for Ibrox for a reported one-tenth of that (and even that turned out to be rubbish) is something nobody has ever been asked to explain.

Nor has Ben Banks of the Daily Record been asked to explain the genesis of his own claim on the day of the signing itself that the player’s form at Norwich had fallen off only after the collapse of a proposed “move to Liverpool.”

Whatever they want to tell themselves now, they were all guilty of overdoing the hype with this joker to some degree or another, and they couldn’t seem to stop themselves from continuing to believe the hype long after the bubble had burst.

Every time this guy had a good game, you’d have to wade through gungy rivers of pro-Ibrox rubbish vomited forth about how he was emerging as a top-class football player.

Now, the rewriting of history has started.