Yesterday, Ibrox fans got all the news not fit to print. Are Celtic on the brink of something?

I have always hated that expression that no news is good news. How can that be true? How can no news be good news?

If you ask someone out and they says they’ll think about it, and then you don’t hear from them—is that good news? If you apply for a job and they tell you they’ll let you know if you’ve made the final cut, and then you don’t hear anything—is that good news? No news is not always good news.

But sometimes, no news can be dressed up as good news.

And we know that better than anybody—those of us who follow Scottish football, and in particular the club across the city—because the Scottish media is forever dressing up “no news” as good news over there. And sometimes, just for the fun of it, they even try to dress bad news up as good news.

As I said in the earlier article, these people are losing the plot.

Last night, as we know, the Ibrox club dropped a piece of news into the cycle and tried to spin it as good news.

They confirmed that talks are under way with American investors—the ones the press has been naming for weeks.

And yeah, that was about it, as far as the takeover goes.

So what they really did was confirm their own reporting. “Talks are underway.” But talks have been underway for a while. We knew that. And I’m not quite sure why something everyone already knew made headlines.

They were on a proper little headline-generating spree last night. They announced the appointment of their new director of football—we talked about him earlier in the day of course. The media won’t do any independent scrutiny of his record at Everton, but I found it amusing when I had a look.

They also announced that Umbro’s name will be on the new kit in the coming campaign.

Again, not new information. But they tried to dress it up as a break with Castore when anyone who knows anything at all knows that it is Castore, who recently got a licence to use the Umbro brand.

Fascinating stuff.

You have no news dressed up as good news. You have bad news dressed up as good news. And you have absolutely indifferent, “nothing has changed” news dressed up as good news—dressed up, in fact, as “everything has changed” news. It wows me. Three separate news stories, all of them spun ridiculously—and two of them simply recycling stuff that’s been in the public domain for ages.

A lot of people think this blog covers their club a hell of a lot. But if you look at what this article is about—and if you look at what so many of our articles are about—they’re not about them at all.

It’s as my good friend Auldheid used to say all the time whenever he was challenged on Resolution 12, on the grounds that it was part of some ongoing Ibrox obsession: “It isn’t about them. It’s about the governing bodies and the process.”

And if you read carefully enough, you’ll understand that just as Resolution 12 was about the SFA and not the Ibrox club, so too a lot of what I write is about the media and how it covers the Ibrox club—acting almost like cheerleaders.

What happened last night was that they renewed their deal with Castore, appointed a guy who Everton were going to sack, and “confirmed” a story that’s been in the public domain for well over two months—and tried to disguise it as a giant leap forward when in fact it’s more of the same.

It was a lot of heat to generate over not very much at all. You would almost think that something was happening this weekend which doesn’t involve them, and which they want to try to deflect some attention away from.

Again, it just shows how terminally bad these people are at public relations and PR, because everyone knows that if you’re going to do these kinds of stories in a big loop like this, you do them after the weekend. You do them directly after our title win, so they dominate the whole of next week’s news cycle instead of us.

They’re just not very good overall across town. They’re just not very smart about any of this stuff. But I understand why they had to get this statement out. It’s because all the talk around this is trending in the wrong direction for them.

For the rest of us, I suspect it’s becoming tiresome and boring.

Either today or tomorrow, I’m going to write a longer piece on that subject. But suffice to say, I just want the phoney war over with.

If these people are really coming in, and they’ve got this big plan, then let’s go. If it makes our club up its game, if it shakes our directors awake from their slumber, then as far as I’m concerned that’s all to the good.