The Daily Record finds another ex-Celtic player to whine about how horrible we are.

Yesterday, the Daily Record published one of those extraordinarily poor pieces of clickbait for which it has become famous, a piece of clickbait with an anti-Rodgers, anti-Celtic slant, accusing him of being some sort of monster in the way he treated one of our former signings. I don’t even know why I bothered to read the piece.

The article’s about the player Kundai Benyu.

And if you had to Google that and remind yourself who we’re talking about, then I suggest you weren’t alone. I had to do the same thing. As per usual, the Record has slapped a ludicrous headline on their story. But in this case, the headline is no more ridiculous or lurid than what the player actually said.

“Brendan Rodgers lured me to Celtic then treated me like I didn’t exist – it was HORRIBLE and I still don’t know why,” shrieks the headline.

The whole thing is self-pitying, whining nonsense.

He wants to know why he wasn’t considered a first-team player at Celtic, why Rodgers didn’t treat him as one. Well, it’s tempting to say that part of the answer is in the question. He sounds like a whiny, entitled brat as opposed to a professional who was willing to work hard and take his chances when they came along.

Rodgers never treats players as badly as this guy suggests. But he has a very low tolerance for those who aren’t up to the job.

Nor does he like players who whine about the injustice and the hardships of not being considered good enough for the team.

“It was a horrible experience, but I will say that it helped me to grow,” the player said. Maybe it’s just me, but those kinds of comments don’t exactly reflect much growth. He certainly doesn’t sound like he’s developed any appreciation for the subtleties of the situation, which to me is obvious—he just wasn’t that good.

We signed potential, and when it was clear that the potential had been overblown, when it was clear that the player wasn’t going to cut it, we did what we had to do. Welcome to life at a big club. Welcome to life at a major football institution where the manager doesn’t have time to coddle people, stroke egos, or pander to those who think they deserve more simply because they feel entitled to it.

Let me put it this way: if this guy had been left to rot in the reserves for years, you could argue Rodgers treated him badly and played a role in the ruination of his career. But that’s not what happened.

This guy was signed fresh from a loan spell at Aldershot Town, way down near the bottom of the English football pyramid. Celtic didn’t just abandon him. Celtic sent him back out on loan to Oldham, a League One club, where he couldn’t establish himself as a regular. Think about that for a minute.

He wants to know why he wasn’t a first team player at Celtic, when he couldn’t even achieve that goal in the third tier in England. That might make someone with more self-awareness pause for thought. Not this guy.

A year later, we sent him to Helsingborg on loan. Not exactly throwing him away—this was his last chance to prove he had anything at all. He played 10 games there. When we cut his contract short and allowed him to leave, where did he go? Did he stay in Norway? Did he reach out for the next rung on the ladder?

No, he didn’t. He returned to English football’s National League and then moved to the Icelandic league. Perhaps he’ll blame Brendan Rodgers for all that, too.

Furthermore, Rodgers signed him at the start of his second season in charge of the club. Rodgers wasn’t to last longer than 18 months beyond that point, so it’s really not down to him what happened after he left in February 2019. But small details like that aren’t really considered important when the objective is to paint Rodgers as some kind of terrible man and Celtic as some kind of terrible club.

“I always think about it,” Benyu said in this atrocious interview. “Asking myself what I really did wrong, and I can’t think of anything because this is the same team that lured me there at first.”

And again, it’s right there in the words he uses. He can’t think of anything he personally did wrong. He can’t think of any mistakes he personally might have made. Only a very self-centred person can’t look at his own behaviour, performance, and conduct and not find fault somewhere.

There’s no shame in just not being up to the job.

Better players than him have come to Celtic and found it way bigger and way tougher than they ever imagined. Most of them have taken it on the chin. Most of them have realised their own limitations. But there are always a handful who like to complain bitterly about the injustice of it all—about the injustice of being found out in one of the most merit-driven sports in the world.

And for some reason—and we all know what the reason is—the Daily Record just loves highlighting this crap.

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