Celtic fans do not need Andy Halliday to tell us who is not playing well.

Sometimes it feels like it wouldn’t be a day in the life of the average Celtic fan without somebody, somewhere offering us the wisdom of Andy Halliday.

There’s one particular Celtic site — and I’m not going to name it or the writer — which seems to think we all wake up every morning desperate to know what Andy Halliday thinks about any given subject.

Perhaps next he’ll offer his thoughts on the war in Iran, just so we can all share in those too. I’m not convinced that would be essential reading.

Because the truth is, I don’t find Andy Halliday’s thoughts on Celtic interesting in the slightest. He does not care about Celtic unless he’s having a go at us. He’s a former Ibrox player, he’s played for Hearts, and now he’s at a club sitting fourth in the table.

Yet he seems to have an awful lot of free time to go around talking about what other teams in the league are doing, and ours in particular.

And today, once again, someone could not wait to share his latest pearls of wisdom, this time on Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.

Now, I agree that Oxlade-Chamberlain has not been brilliant. I wrote earlier this week that part of the problem is the system he’s being asked to play in. It’s slow, it’s pedestrian, and it does not suit his natural game. If we are going to win this title with seven games left and a 100 percent record required, we need to unlock the footballer in him rather than bury him in a system that drags everything down.

Halliday says he “can’t believe how he just strolls around.”

I can’t believe that a player whose highest career honour is the Scottish Championship — and I’ll give him his due, he’s won it twice — can be so dismissive of a footballer who has won multiple English Premier League titles and the Champions League.

There is no comparison, no shared experience.

There is no kinship between Andy Halliday and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and when you look at their respective careers, that becomes obvious very quickly. Halliday is 34. Oxlade-Chamberlain is 32. One has played at the very highest level of the game, consistently, for years. The other has not.

We have long speculated about what kind of player Oxlade-Chamberlain might be under a different manager, under a different system, in a team that actually plays to his strengths. But I can say this with some certainty: Andy Halliday will not, in the remainder of his career, come close to the heights that Oxlade-Chamberlain has already reached.

And yet we are expected to treat his opinions as if they carry real weight.

That’s the part I don’t understand.

Every single one of us watches this Celtic team. Every one of us can see that Oxlade-Chamberlain has not yet made the impact we hoped for. The idea that we need Andy Halliday to come along and tell us that is ridiculous.

This is not insight. This is not analysis. It is stating the obvious.

And it’s not even the first time. It happens constantly. If you removed that particular website’s obsession with Andy Halliday, his name recognition would drop to the point where he’d become one of those pub quiz questions nobody can answer until someone reads it out and everyone goes, “Oh yeah… I vaguely remember him.”

In short, if I didn’t know better, I’d say Andy Halliday himself writes some of those articles. Otherwise, his name would vanish from our consciousness.

Meanwhile, Halliday plays for Motherwell. Motherwell are not mathematically out of catching us. I don’t think that will happen, but let’s be honest, with the way we’re playing right now, very little can be discounted.

We look vulnerable. We look soft, like a team with a weak underbelly, and even in games we win, there are signs of it.

So, from a purely footballing perspective, Halliday would love it if his team could catch us. And let’s not pretend otherwise — if it comes down to it, Celtic are not the club he wants to see lifting anything this season. Not even close.

Let’s call it what it is. Andy Halliday is a former Ibrox player who does not wish Celtic well. That’s fine. That’s football. But it does make the obsession with his opinions all the more baffling. Why should we care what he thinks?

We wouldn’t ask him about tactics. We wouldn’t ask him about building a squad. Nobody would ask him what it takes to compete at the very highest level of European football, because he has no experience of any of that.

And yet, somehow, people keep forcing his views into the Celtic conversation as if they matter. They don’t.

Whenever I hear him — usually while I’m listening to something else — I remember this: without football, he offers nothing in terms of insight or analysis.

So again, I come back to the same question.

Why should I care? And the answer is simple. I don’t.

But someone clearly does. Someone who keeps inflicting Celtic cyberspace with his opinions, over and over again, and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had just about enough of seeing Andy Halliday in my timeline.

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