Keevins latest betrays his utter contempt for his readers … and justifies our contempt for him.

For all my disdain for the man, I sort of understand that there’s a weird, backhanded compliment in the way I dissect a lot of Keith Jackson’s articles.

I find him to be the sterling example of bad journalism in Scotland. But the thing is, I treat him with a certain amount of respect because I consider him a journalist, at least in the textbook sense. There are worse writers out there than Jackson, but I don’t regard them as journalists—not even in the textbook sense.

Take the Village Idiot. He’s a far worse writer than Jackson. But he’s such an idiot that I don’t consider it worthwhile to do a full-scale hatchet job on any of his pieces. When it comes to him, you can gauge the overall quality just by looking at a central point, which is more often than not utterly ridiculous and unworthy of any kind of deep dive.

Keevins is not as good a writer as Jackson either.

But he’s a pure troll—or at least he tries to be. He’s not smart enough to be effective as a troll, nor is he funny. Being a troll requires a certain amount of intelligence, which he doesn’t possess. And to be a troll, you really need to have bottle and backbone, because you know you’re going to get criticised and confronted over what you write. Keevins, prone to backtracking and periods of amnesia which have nothing to do with his advancing years, is as gutless as anyone working in the field. I haven’t considered him a journalist in decades.

That’s why those moments when I give Jackson-style scrutiny to something Keevins has written are very, very rare. But today he’s more than earned it—and not because what he’s written resembles journalism in any way. It’s because it is so bad that it actually demands my full attention and more than just a cursory glance.

I’ll be honest with you, this came to me as a referral, or I would never have known what he had written. A friend emailed me today, and his message started with the words Happy Hugh Keevins Day. That’s how I knew whatever he’d written was bad. Of course, it was bad—terrible, even. But this time, it scaled new heights of awfulness. And so, here we are.

Preamble aside, I want to get on with this because I prefer to spend as little time with this geezer as possible. And right away, just reading the headline, my eyes started to bleed.

It’s Google time when you can’t beat Celtic but Clement being kaput is (an Ibrox) thing only – Hugh Keevins

I had to read that three or four times because I wasn’t convinced I was reading something written in English. You read something like that, and you think: has the writer lost his mind? Did he write that drunk? Or on drugs? And I know Keevins himself isn’t the headline writer, but that’s like vomited up word salad.

Ibrox diehards have come to the conclusion the manager is a dead loss based on their matchday reaction.

Oh so, it’s based on the matchday reaction, is it?

Maybe Keevins has missed the fact that the radio shows—one of which he’s on—are full of their moaning, that their social media accounts are overflowing with it, and their forums are on a 24-hour loop of the same. If he’s basing this solely on matchday reaction, he’s missing the bigger picture. Those fans have made up their minds, loud and clear.

And here we go into the main body of the piece. Boy, oh boy …

What if Sevco beat Celtic in the Premier Sports Cup Final at Hampden next month?

Straight away, you can see where this is going, can’t you? The old, familiar Keevins patterns are asserting themselves. I’m going to seriously embarrass him over the course of this piece—or at least, I’ll try. He’s one of those people I tend to think of as beyond embarrassment, but I’ll do my best. One thing I’ll certainly do is hang him with his own words. But for now, let’s ponder that question: the lowest form of opinion writing there is—“What if?”

You could literally fill libraries with bad high school essays based on that question. “What if?” Talk about pitching to the lowest common denominator.

On the surface, it’s a reasonable enough question, but as the first line of an article, it’s a foundation made of sand. Since the idea itself is rotten, you can just imagine what the rest of the building will look like. And sure enough, Keevins misses every mark.

And is it not the case there’s more chance of Celtic dropping league points against Hearts at Tynecastle and Aberdeen at Pittodrie than of Sevco slipping up against Dundee United and Kilmarnock at Ibrox on the same days? If that happened, the title race could involve three—not just two—teams before we get to Hampden for the first showpiece of the season on December 15.

Pathetic, isn’t it? Here’s his fantasy scenario, where he can dust off the old broken Celtic badge and pen a piece about how our season is on the brink of collapse. Meanwhile, he hails the Ibrox manager as having turned things around and marching boldly onward. Writing those paragraphs should make him cringe. Back at his desk, he should be mortified. But there it is: in his mind, Celtic are crippled and broken, dropping points in league matches, losing the cup final, shattered and vulnerable.

We haven’t lost a game domestically. We don’t look like losing one. In fact, we could very easily sweep the Ibrox side away at Hampden, having smashed six past Aberdeen in the semi-final. But somehow, we look more likely to drop points than the side that’s nine points behind us? Is this a joke? Because it reads like a joke, and the writer comes across like a clown.

Sevco manager Philippe Clement seems to have been declared dead and buried without any factual evidence that a fatality has taken place. And it’s Sevco fans, and nobody else, who have come to the conclusion the manager is a dead loss based on their matchday reaction. They’ve had problems with the stands at Ibrox since the season began, of course. First of all, there was that business with the steel that was late in arriving for the refurbishment of the Copland Road stand.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. It’s only the Ibrox fans who think Clement is drowning and should be thrown a cinder block rather than a rubber ring? That’s nonsensical. Half the mainstream media thinks he’s finished. Half of them were writing not long ago that he was finished. “It’s only the Ibrox fans” is a ridiculous statement. Keevins wants to talk about factual evidence before writing that? Maybe he should engage with the other human beings in the newsroom or read some of what they write. Half the country thinks Clement is finished, and much of the other half knows it but is egging the club on to keep him so we can continue laughing.

The latest difficulty appears to affect all four stands at the ground. The problem is they face on to the pitch. And the people in them can’t wait to get out, driven to evacuate the premises by the unwatchable nature of the manager’s tactics and the unfathomable aspects of his team selection. A growing percentage appear to believe Clement doesn’t know what he’s doing and have ruled out any rethink while he remains in charge. The Belgian is on trial in the court of public opinion.

There is nothing more cringeworthy than these terrible pretend-writers trying to be funny. Funny takes skill. Funny is not recycled, fifth-hand jokes.

That whole segment is horrible to read.

It reminds me that somewhere out there are entire books with Keevins’ name on the front of them, which in turn reminds me of Sartre’s famous play No Exit, about a mysterious room where three people cannot escape each other and their mere presence is a form of torture. They are in the afterlife, and it’s from this that we get the expression “Hell is other people.” I know that my idea of Hell is spending eternity with Keevins, listening to his irritating, nasal voice droning on while an audiobook version of one of those books of his plays on an endless loop.

The spectator gallery is full for the proceedings while Ibrox regularly empties before the end of matches. There was a succession of radio callers last Sunday night following the final whistle in Sevco’ 1-0 win over Hearts. Each specified the exact time when they’d had enough and left the premises long before a game, which was hanging in the balance, had reached its conclusion.

Yeah, and if most of our hacks weren’t compelled to stay and watch because they had to write about it, they’d have been on the first subway train out of there too. There’s only so much of that you can watch before your brain starts to melt. If all football looked like their football, no one would watch the sport.

There is an indisputable law governing two-horse races in the Premiership. You can’t finish third. Not when you are Sevco and the patience of the fans has been tested beyond human endurance for years while playing runner-up to the team across the road on the other side of the city.

Another paragraph that reads like random jumbled words. “The team across the road on the other side of the city”?

Keevins should be drummed out of the guild for writing like that.

He should have his journalistic credentials revoked for putting that sentence into an article and publishing it under his own name. And as for that “law governing two-horse races,” I’m pretty sure it’s the same in every football environment reduced to two contenders. Finishing third is always a disaster.

The Ibrox club isn’t special in that regard, no matter how much they like to think they are.

Likewise, Clement will have to beat Celtic in the cup final to avoid a guilty verdict. But Philippe appears, to my way of thinking, to have been made a felon before all the evidence has been gathered. What if he wins the final and reduces the deficit before the next (Glasgow derby)? I celebrated my 75th birthday last Tuesday and, being a lifelong Glaswegian, I know the rules relative to that rivalry from top to bottom and back to front.

Oh, it was your birthday last Tuesday, and I forgot to send you a card? Shame on me. How will I ever sleep … oh wait, I just remembered that I don’t care. Neither does anyone else.

At 75, Keevins is nothing but a wage thief. There are young, up-and-coming writers at that newspaper, I’m sure of it, who can’t get on the pitch because it’s paying people like him. He should be ashamed to collect a salary for churning out this drivel while others can’t get their break.

Clement’s side went out of the Champions League against a rank Dynamo Kiev side. They’ve lost to Celtic, Aberdeen, and Kilmarnock. They’ve drawn with Hearts. The evidence is in. And if you’ve actually watched the football on offer, it’s not the sort of football that will keep anyone at Celtic up at night. It’s not even the kind of football that would keep people in Aberdeen up at night.

If Clement loses to Celtic and goes six games without a win over Brendan Rodgers’ side, he should go home and Google removal firms in his adopted part of the city. The manager of Sevco who can’t beat Celtic can’t remain as Sevco’ manager.

Let me get this straight. Let me see if I’ve understood this.

The manager whom everyone is judging too early now has one game to save his job, and that’s at Hampden? How does Keevins reconcile writing the everything already in this piece with that statement? So, it’s unfair to judge Clement based on being nine points behind Aberdeen and out of the Champions League to a side we’d swat away without breaking a sweat … but it’s perfectly fine to sack him if he loses the next game against Celtic? That’s the line in the sand?

This is the kind of writing that makes me wonder if Keevins’ whole career has been a joke.

A joke on the people who pay his salary and a joke on the people who read his columns or listen to him on the radio. It’s one of the traits I most associate with Jackson too—the whiplash of reading a piece where you’re heading one way, only to be suddenly jerked into facing the opposite direction.

I know the charge sheet. Sevco have scored the same number of league goals as 10th-placed St Johnstone. Clement also looked along his subs bench last Sunday, during a tortuous display against the second-bottom team, and put on Danilo, Robbie McAusland and Kieran Dowell while ignoring Ianis Hagi as a possible performance enhancer.

“While ignoring Hagi as a possible performance enhancer.” Jesus, that is painful to read. But that’s the charge sheet, is it? I think the real charge sheet is much, much longer than that.

But am I to believe that, with 27 league games left to play and a one-off cup final to come, Clement is kaput? I’ve done some backtracking in my time, but Clement’s critics from within his club’s fan base will need to perform a somersault of Olympic proportions if they’re wrong about him.

This is where, if Keevins had even the slightest shred of self-respect, I’d embarrass him. But ego and arrogance shouldn’t be mistaken for self-respect—or self-awareness, for that matter. This guy is wholly beyond embarrassment. He has made so many backtracks in his time that a better man would have hung up his pen years ago, recognising that he was hopelessly out of his depth commenting on a game he no longer understands—if he ever understood it in the first place.

I only had to look back 14 days to 3 November to find an article with Keevins’ name on it and this headline: Philippe Clement has forced me into revision of Sevco opinion after committing professional suicide – Hugh Keevins.

And what was the basic tenor of that piece? That Clement was a dead man walking and had shown himself to be a false idol.

I remembered that article the moment I started to read this nonsense, because it was so cringeworthy I wrote a piece on it. Yes, Clement did force Keevins to revise his opinion—which initially was that Clement walked on water. As I said in that earlier article, it wasn’t about Clement having revealed some flaw no one had seen before. It was about Keevins feeling humiliated by how sycophantic his earlier coverage had been.

What you’re about to read is from Keevins’ own pen, written in that article two weeks ago:

“When the Belgian arrived in Glasgow, I wrote here that his back story at Club Brugge and Monaco suggested he was the first truly credible Sevco manager that Brendan Rodgers had faced. Time, and circumstances, have forced a revision of that opinion. Clawing back the nine-point deficit to Aberdeen and Celtic might, from this distance, seem unlikely.”

So, in fact, this is a backtrack on a backtrack.

Because prior to the semi-final, Clement had “one game to save his job.”

Now, prior to the final, he has one game to save his job.

But Keevins insists it’s only the fans who’ve concluded Clement is finished, even though Keevins himself wrote about how “unlikely” it was for Clement to recover.

Imagine the contempt for your own readers required to write an article and publish something like this.

They can hardly claim it’s a misunderstanding and their derogatory words have been taken out of context. English might not be the manager’s first language, but he’ll still know that the meaning of baloney doesn’t get lost in translation. Clement has, meanwhile, got to make the most of what happens between now and December 15.

Just like Keevins’ derogatory words have been taken out of context—repeatedly, on this subject and others. Right? Okay then.

The fixture list offers a sequence of solace or grounds for dismissal that will speak eloquently for themselves. It’s up to him.

It’ll certainly speak more eloquently than Keevins has ever managed to write.