McGarry’s Daily Mail article is pitiful. Celtic fans have been saying it all for months.

One of the things that most pleases me as a Celtic blogger is when the mainstream media finally catches up to us and starts seeing things the way we see them.

It’s amusing because these people shouldn’t need to be hit over the head with the facts before they understand them, and they shouldn’t need the evidence to be piling up in drifts to recognise what we can see quite clearly every single week with only a fraction of the available information.

Part of it is simply about wanting to see it, I suppose, and a lot of these guys don’t. But that seems like a lame excuse when certain things are so glaringly obvious.

Today, John McGarry in the Daily Mail has written an excoriating piece on the Ibrox club and their performances in the league so far—particularly at the weekend. And it’s that weekend performance which seems to have slapped his eyes open and made him recognise the truly wretched state of the club across the city.

I found it very amusing to read McGarry’s piece today, and I’m going to share some of the highlights. I won’t subject it to the full Keith Jackson treatment—maybe the half Keith Jackson—because I suspect I might have to do an actual Keith Jackson later on.

McGarry’s article is entitled: “Pitiful display shows Barry Ferguson just how deep the problems run at Ibrox.”

Last night on the podcast, I said that Ferguson’s appointment stinks of a certain type of entitlement and arrogance. Earlier today, I posted the Ewan Jones piece where I talked about how that entitlement manifests itself and how it is largely the result of a kind of weird cultural exceptionalism—a belief that all they have to do is show up. McGarry’s article actually echoes some of those points.

Here’s what he had to say about the nature of the display itself:

“Despite suffering those back-to-back home defeats and talking the talk after the modest improvement in Wednesday’s second half in Ayrshire, the players produced another performance which was nothing short of pitiful.”

What that suggests to me is that he, like a lot of other people, got lost in a little bit of hysteria after Wednesday and has now been brought crashing back to Earth. I know Ferguson certainly expected his side to just roll up and comfortably win that game at the weekend—I mean, that’s evident just from his post-match remarks. But I think there were a lot of people in the media who laboured under the same strange delusion. The nature of that defeat and the performances of some of the players has really taken the blinkers off for many of our hacks, and McGarry can’t hide his pain.

This is what he had to say about the general expectation that a new manager—any new manager, even one as incredibly ill-prepared as Ferguson—could just walk in there and start making the team better. And it’s extraordinary that a mainstream journalist actually wrote this:

“The argument being widely forwarded was that (Clement) was the root of the problem, a man who was preventing a talented group of players from showing their true worth. On this evidence, that wasn’t entirely accurate.”

That argument was widely pushed, and I know that a lot of people bought into it. Ferguson definitely believed it. In his own arrogance and ego, he assumed he could just walk in and things would immediately improve. But no mainstream journalist who’s actually watched that team—nobody who’s actually supposed to take a neutral standpoint and view this with a critical eye—could have seriously believed that, surely? Except, yes… some of them did.

It’s when McGarry gets to naming and shaming individual players that I really started laughing. Because it echoes so much of what we’ve said in the blogs, on the podcasts, and what every one of you reading this already knows—that there are individual players at that club who are grossly overhyped, and others who are just an embarrassment for picking up their wages.

“Robin Propper’s display at centre-half was lamentable. The Dutchman scarcely won a header and rarely found a man with a routine pass. He did well to last until half-time when he was replaced by Leon Balogun.”

We’ve all had a good laugh at him and at that signing. It’s one of the worst in the recent history of the game here. As I said in the piece this morning, he’s openly admitted that he’s petrified every time he walks onto the pitch. He plays like someone who has no top-level experience at all. The fact that this guy captained a team in the Dutch league is beyond me.

“Jefte was all over the place. The Brazilian failed to make simple interceptions, lost runners and hit aimless passes straight out of play. It was extraordinary that the left-back played the entire match.”

This was written—without a trace of embarrassment—by someone in a profession that, not long ago, was suggesting this guy was a target for Chelsea. A full-back who struggled in Cyprus, labelled there as someone who still had a lot to learn in the position he was signed to play in. The coverage he received was absolutely absurd, and it should be a source of deep shame for anyone who ever wrote one of those articles or worked at a newspaper that published them.

“Ianis Hagi ran about, fell over, and made no appreciable impact. Out of contract in the summer, the Romanian’s mind no longer looks to be on the job he’s still paid handsomely to do. Not that Nedim Bajrami, the man who replaced him at the interval, did much better.”

I’ve almost exhausted the limits of the language when it comes to criticising people who think Hagi is a player. It is incredible to me that sports journalists, who are supposedly experts, can hype this guy the way they do. He’s virtually Keith Jackson’s favourite player at Ibrox, and I do not understand why.

To me, he is an empty shirt. You’d be better playing with ten men. He’s a waste of space.

And Bajrami? How much did they pay for him? That’s the kind of signing that gets managers sacked.

He is so far off the pace that even our media can’t pretend they see a footballer there.

“Hamza Igamane has produced some fine moments for the side this season. There have been few in recent weeks. The Moroccan looks a shadow of the player who might well have attracted a bumper left-field bid in January.”

The only people who believed he was ever going to attract a “bumper left-field bid” in January are the type who would buy the Kingston Bridge ten times over. What the hell is McGarry talking about? Igamane had one good month of football. One. And since then, nothing. Yet our media turned a tiny uptick in form into stories about Premier League clubs sniffing around him—all of it utterly fanciful, all of it entirely fictitious.

“As for Jack Butland? The experienced keeper is doing little to ensure some pride is salvaged from this dismal season. His handling is suspect, his kicking is poor. The days when all the talk was of an England recall feel like they now belong to another age.”

Probably the funniest paragraph in the whole piece. That talk of an England recall didn’t belong to another age—it belonged to another reality. But that didn’t stop the hacks from treating it as if it had some basis in this one. It never did.

If he was waiting for the phone to ring, it was more likely going to be Domino’s Pizza asking him to confirm the address than Gareth Southgate offering him a chance at some caps.

These people only have themselves to blame for the suffering they’re going through now, as the cold light of reality creeps across the floorboards of whatever mad castle of lunacy they’ve locked themselves in for the rest of this season.

The truth is finally sinking in. They’re realising Clement wasn’t the only problem—that maybe, just maybe, that team just isn’t very good.

Welcome to the party, lads. Took you long enough.

Cause most of us have known all this for months.

Photo by James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images

Our latest podcast is up now, we’ve called it Sprinting To The Finish … and we did it live! Please show us your support by subscribing on YouTube!