The Record’s attempt to make Celtic part of the Poku story was pitiful.

Last night, The Record produced one of the worst attempts to cast our club in a bad light that I’ve seen in a while.

That publication is not smart, nor written by smart people, but its effort to draw a negative comment—or the suggestion that Celtic had been “snubbed” by Kwame Poku at Peterborough—was as brazen and bad as they come.

And it failed into the bargain. Like I said, we are not dealing here with the brightest and best when it comes to these folks.

I knew this story was going to surface.

Nothing on this Earth was more certain—not even death or taxes. Poku plays on the right wing. We are looking for a player on the right wing, and although we’re tracking Nygren and look as if we’re going to get him, there is a lot of chatter about Kühn, as we all know… and if he goes, we’ll be looking at another player on that side because the manager wants that squad depth.

With this in mind, the sensible question to ask is this: if this guy is so good, would Celtic not have been in for him as well? Championship clubs? A few teams scattered across Europe? He looked good in League One, but does that translate into his being a world beater? You would think not. You would not say so.

If he was a top talent, where is Celtic?

The Record was hoping that we’d be in the mix somewhere, in light of stories that he’s considering Ibrox and that they are now the favourites to get him.

They interviewed Barry Fry, who is never slow to talk up his players and has a long history of failing to sell his so-called “stars” at the right time, and he was very obviously asked about Celtic and whether we’d had an interest.

He said no. Of course he said no. Not one of us has even heard a whisper of a rumour on this front. Not one of us has heard a peep about interest from our club. At a time when we are scouring the Earth for right wingers with decent stats, in a decent age bracket and at the right price—he’s free, you don’t get more “right” than that—there has been nothing from our camp.

There are some at The Record who are smart enough to know this and what it means: we took a look but took a pass. Would you bet on our scouts or theirs? Would you bet on our analytics guys or theirs, based on some of the dreck they have in their squad at the current time?

Furthermore, he missed a part of last season with an injury.

That’s being spun as a positive because he still made the League One Team of the Year—but it might also mean there are doubts about his fitness. It’s hard to know. What I do know is that the alleged interest in him certainly doesn’t extend to the 25 clubs that people around him are pitching as being “out there”… that smells like agents at work.

Linking our club with a move for a player they look like they’re going to get is an old trick, and it’s one that we’ve seen so many times before that you don’t fall for it any longer. Celtic fans, by and large, are waiting to see what we do.

We’re not bothered about what happens across the city. But when the media tries to pull little stunts like this, then we get bothered. Barry Fry rejected the idea of Celtic’s involvement immediately upon being asked. But the question is, why was he asked in the first place?

I know there’s an idea out there that we’ve somehow got an obsession with the Ibrox club. I mean, please give me a break. It’s a kind of smear that’s been used to tar people everywhere. It’s the Ibrox fans’ equivalent of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

And it doesn’t dissuade me at all from pursuing facts and information, and writing about what I see happen over there. As I’ve said before, we need to know what they’re getting up to. We need to keep an eye on it at all times—because we’re the only ones who do.

And it’s not enough for these people to think that they’ve got a player. They have to imagine that player has snubbed Celtic on the way to signing for them. At every single juncture, they have to imagine some fantasy in which we’re the loser and they’re the winner. You tell me who sounds obsessed there.

This is just typical of the way they do things. I couldn’t tell you if we’ve looked at the player. I know we haven’t made a bid for him, because that would be in the news—it’d be another one of those “Glasgow clubs go head-to-head” stories. And the fact that there hasn’t been one tells you that the media knows we haven’t made a bid.

But still, the question was put to Barry Fry. And the hope was that it would draw some answer that would allow them to say, “Oh look, we’ve beaten Celtic here.”

What a pitiful bunch our media are.