Celtic fans do not need to hear the “wisdom” of the Sunday Mail’s resident clown.

Everyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that there are people in the Scottish media whose opinions should not matter to us at all, because those opinions are either so biased or so pig ignorant that giving them any credence whatsoever is akin to trying to win a debate in one of those El Salvadoran government torture chambers.

If you reckon people like the village idiot, or Alan Hutton, or Keith Jackson, or Hugh Keevins have opinions we ought to be interested in then you are probably as daft as someone who thinks that a political discussion can get you out of one of those rooms.

None of these people are friends of our club. Some of them are well-known adversaries of it, and one of them is a poisonous old man who thinks he’s a controversialist, but in fact is more akin to that barely tolerable aged relative so many folk seem to have — the one whose opinions they just nod along with while internally cringing, because that person is so colossally stupid and ignorant, and their “views” so outdated and backward, that you can’t help but feel embarrassed for them.

This Scottish media joker is on record as branding members of our first team squad wastes of money. Wow. What else is new? I could have lived my life without knowing that, without it bothering me one bit — except that another site published his quotes as if his views were something we badly needed to hear. They aren’t.

Only the names change with this guy, but the tune is the same one we’ve been hearing from him for what must be decades now. He’s the expert on everything we’re doing wrong — all the duds we’ve signed, all the managers who’ve been a huge disappointment, all the flaws in the strategy, all the ways we’re doomed to fail.

Hey, I should be sympathetic to some of that — I’ve got issues with the strategy, as many of us do. But those are considered, reasoned, calculated, thought-through. His version is all over the place, like monkey shit in a zoo.

For all his scattershot critiques — half of them colossally uninformed rubbish, and the other half just pure dripping poison — the trophies keep piling up at Celtic Park. Players come and go, and many of those who do leave net us vast profits.

He, on the other hand, has demonstrated repeatedly that he wouldn’t know a good footballer from a bad one if the good one was the one who booted him squarely in the nuts. His judgement — are we really calling it that? — has been exposed not just as flawed, but absolutely brain-dead, time and time again.

And all this does, of course, is feed a perception — a bad perception — that we’ve wasted a lot of money on certain footballers. Certain people are encouraged to push this negative line, and that is designed to turn fans against players and manager both.

It suits some to paint Celtic as a wasteful club and Rodgers in particular as a wasteful manager. Thank God we can afford it, eah? But I can’t believe that there are folk out there who don’t recognise that this is the narrative they’re feeding into when they promote the views of these people without challenging them.

See, they probably don’t see the distinction between what they do and what I do — between promoting those views and what I’m doing in highlighting them. But I’ll tell them what the difference is. I’m highlighting them so I can trash them. I’m highlighting them to defend our players. I don’t know what it is they think they’re doing instead, but I think it’s harmful.

Adam Idah scored two Champions League away goals for us at an English Premier League club. On that night, the Celtic manager said he had been exceptional. I wrote, and many others wrote, that his performance was English Premier League elite level and it was. That same player has scored massive goals for us in domestic football. Without his run onto the ball against Young Boys the Villa game might have been a do-or-die. It was Idah who made sure we went there already through.

The idea that a two-bob hack who thinks he’s a shock jock can slam him and have anyone think that’s a view that ought to be promoted and not scorned is almost funny.

But it’s not funny. We shouldn’t treat it as a joke, even if we treat the man who mouthed those words like one. It is a falsehood told with malicious intent. It is designed to cause harm, harm to Celtic, and that’s why I won’t simply ignore it.

In addition to this, Auston Trusty spent many years of his career in the Premier League and is a full international for the United States. You may not think he suits Celtic’s system as well as he might, but I happen to think he has the attributes to be a fine defender if he can only improve on certain elements of his game. There is a reason we paid big money for him, and why Rodgers thinks he’s got something to offer.

And don’t get me started on this idiot’s views on Jota, a young guy who didn’t play a lot of games in the last year and has been excellent for Celtic since returning, and without the benefit of bedding properly in with his team-mates or the system. That’s not an opinion as much as it’s a hateful rant drooling venom.

People who actually know what they’re talking about — professionals within football, people whose opinions I’d prefer to listen to, whose views I’d prefer to take on board, whose judgement I’d prefer to trust — entirely disagree with this relic of sports writings bygone age. A guy who never wrote a story that wasn’t handed to him on a plate. A guy who’s been caught lying about Celtic and about people at our club. A guy whose opinions have been exposed as shallow and idiotic, again and again and again.

He’s telling us that the professionals at our club — and Rodgers in particular — can’t spot a player. He’s telling us, in effect, that he knows better than the guy who won every trophy he competed for the last time he was here, and who by the end of this season, will have won five out of the last six. The guy who’s never been beaten at Hampden and the guy who, in all probability, will depart as our second most successful manager of all time — and by quite a distance.

This same joker didn’t think Jo Venglos could spot a player either. Or Martin O’Neill. He was questioning Ange’s judgement from the moment he was hired until the moment he fell to his knees, slobbering to kiss the ring like so many others. He turned on Rodgers almost as soon as he was back, and then last year, when our manager had triumphed, he wrote a sycophantic piece about how Rodgers had spoken to him for five minutes in a supermarket carpark.

His last moment of note, worthy of discussion, was to tell us the story of how Peter Lawwell scared him out of his bed one morning a month ago to berate him like he was a child because he had repeated someone else’s opinion on the radio, and not only did he take that, but he grovelled through a half apology in his column when so far as I could see he’d done nothing to apologise for.

Which in addition to everything else makes him a contemptible coward.

And anyone who holds his opinion up as if it has value devalues his or herself. If you accept that this fool has no credibility, then promoting him as a source of knowledge or wisdom only damages your own. And if you let him attack Celtic — if you promote those views — then aren’t you yourself attacking this club?

He’s not the only one doing it. But he is the worst. And there’s a reason why he’s viewed with even more contempt than the Jacksons and the Boyds and all the rest of them. He is the bottom of the barrel… and it is truly desperate for anyone to pretend that he is anything more than that.