Celtic fans do not care what the self-promoting troll Ewan Cameron thinks.

So over the last couple of days, I’ve seen a lot on Celtic sites featuring the name Ewan Cameron. I have to say, he is not worth the volume of content that has been produced in anger at his comments.

Cameron is a contemptible figure. His comments are almost always contemptible too. There is rarely much logic to them. There is no real internal consistency, and when he tries to sound bold, there is usually very little behind it.

I had an exchange with him online a few years ago over one of his grandstanding claims. I challenged him to put money on it and I am still waiting. When it came to backing his mouth with anything real, he had no interest.

That is worth remembering when he says that if someone other than Hearts wins the title, he will turn up wearing that club’s shirt in a TV studio. Well, wow. What a sacrifice.

Let’s be honest here. Wearing an Ibrox shirt would not be any great ordeal for him. Wearing a Celtic shirt might annoy him briefly, but even that is not a real bet. It is theatre. It is content. Self-promotion dressed up as bravery.

If you are that confident, put money up. Put it to charity. Make the outcome cost you something. Otherwise, pipe down.

His observation that this is a bad Celtic team is not something many of us will argue with. That is the funny thing about it. He is trying to provoke an argument over a point that very few people dispute. Celtic have been poor. We know that. We have written it, said it and shouted it often enough.

But is this Celtic team better than this Hearts team?

Yes, of course it is.

Any argument to the contrary is nonsense. Even if the league table does not fully show that right now, I suspect it will by the end of the season.

The reason I am even bothering to comment is simple. What Cameron does is easy. It has always been easy because it does not require a scrap of brain power. It does not require knowledge of the game he is supposed to be covering. He comes on, spouts some loud, clownish opinion, then waits for the backlash.

He thinks that makes him a controversialist.

It does not. It makes him a troll.

A real controversialist thinks about an issue before opening his mouth. He goes against the general consensus not because he wants attention, but because he believes the consensus is wrong, or because he thinks everyone else has overlooked something important.

Those people are not just making noise. They are trying to introduce a new way of looking at an issue. You might still disagree with them, but there is thought behind the argument. There is a point to engage with.

There is no fresh insight in saying Celtic are a bad side. We know. Saying it plainly would not get him much attention, though, so he has to inflate it. Celtic are bad, therefore Hearts are better. That is at least debatable in theory, but in reality I think it is nonsense.

When Hearts can reach two cup finals in a season, combine a European campaign with domestic pressure and still sit within three points of the top this late in the campaign, I will give them all the credit they deserve.

But they have not done that.

They have not done any of that.

They had a double-digit lead and threw it away and are now hanging on by a thread. Only a fool struts and preens when faced with that reality.

There is nothing especially controversial about Cameron’s comments. They are the comments of the loudmouth at the end of the bar, and one of the exhausting things about Scottish football is that the media industry is full of people like that.

Cameron is not elevating himself even to the level of a Keith Jackson.

The company he keeps, intellectually at least, is among the Keevins, Leckie and Boyd tier. And the funny thing is that, as bad as those three are, they still have media careers he would probably love to have.

He was the only person in the industry willing to support Ally McCoist’s nonsense over the post-split fixture list. That was not a moment that elevated Cameron. It was a moment when McCoist looked in the mirror and asked himself what on earth he was doing.

And I do not like giving McCoist credit, but I will give him some here. He at least half backed away from those comments and tried to pretend it was all a joke. Cameron, by contrast, remains deadly serious, clinging to the conspiracy theory as if it deserves respect.

That tells you the sort of figure we are dealing with.

I am not here to engage with his point in any great depth because, frankly, he does not have one worth engaging. Cameron sits on the fringes, no matter how seriously he wants to be taken. And the reason he sits there is obvious. His mouth runs far ahead of his brain, not that there is a great distance to travel.

When he tries to think, he rarely gets beyond the first push of an idea.

Debating him seriously is like debating particle physics with a Buckfast-carrying ned on the street. It is a waste of time, and everyone involved comes away slightly worse for the experience.

He is a huckster with an inflated sense of his own importance, and the whole “I’ll wear the rival shirt in a TV studio” routine is part of that. It is not courage. All we’re seeing is branding, and delusional branding at that.

Which TV audience could possibly care about Ewan Cameron, far less what football shirt he wears?

If he wants to be taken seriously, let him make a real wager. Put up money for charity if Hearts fail to win the title. Make the stunt mean something beyond a cheap clip for social media and another few minutes of attention.

But I suspect that is where the line is drawn. Because when a negative outcome no longer benefits him, the bravery tends to vanish.