Andy Halliday is a symptom of the wider anti-Celtic media landscape.

Celtic’s Stephen Welsh gave us one of the images of the weekend.

Motherwell had just gone to Ibrox and won, a result which did real damage to the title hopes of the Ibrox club and changed the mood around the top of the table. It was a huge result for Motherwell as well. They earned it, they celebrated it, and they had every right to enjoy the moment.

Welsh certainly enjoyed it.

The footage of him coming through the corridors at Ibrox, absolutely delighted, was glorious. There are football celebrations, and then there are football celebrations where the player knows exactly what he has just been part of.

Welsh understood the size of that result. He knew what it meant for Motherwell and what it meant for Celtic. He knew what it meant for the Ibrox club. The fact he is a Motherwell player at the moment, while being on loan from Celtic, only made the whole thing funnier.

Football gives you these little moments now and then. They are not the main story, but they crystallise it beautifully.

Welsh roaring with joy inside Ibrox did exactly that.

Then there was Andy Halliday. That was a different image altogether.

Halliday is currently a Motherwell player. He is also a former Ibrox player. He is also a former Hearts player. So, on paper, that result should have worked for him on just about every level except one.

His current club had won a huge game away from home. One of his old clubs, Hearts, benefited from the result. The title race was blown open a little further. It was a day when a Motherwell player should have been delighted.

Yet the footage did not exactly scream joy.

It looked more like someone had told him his cat had been run over.

That contrast with Welsh was fascinating. Welsh looked like a player celebrating a huge win for the club he is currently representing. Halliday looked like a man wrestling with something far more awkward, and this is where the thing becomes bigger than one corridor clip and a few laughs on social media.

Would Welsh have looked like that if Motherwell had beaten Celtic?

Would he have dragged himself through the corridor with the emotional weight of a man leaving a funeral? I wonder.

He might not have celebrated quite as wildly, because he is a Celtic player and there is a professional line there.

But there is a difference between managing your reaction and looking visibly crushed because your current team has won a massive football match.

Halliday did not look like a man managing his reaction.

He looked like a man whose first loyalty was obvious.

That is his business as a player, up to a point. Footballers are human beings. They have allegiances, histories and clubs they love. Nobody expects them to become emotional blank slates the moment they change dressing rooms.

But Halliday is not just a player anymore.

He is also part of the Scottish football media ecosystem. He is a pundit with a platform. Some Celtic sites never tire of sharing his wit and wisdom with the rest of us, to my growing frustration and annoyance. He comments on games. He helps shape narratives around clubs, managers, players, referees and title races.

That is where the problem begins.

Scottish football has a very strange relationship with partisanship. It does not merely tolerate it. It often seems to prefer it. The sharper the club allegiance, the more obvious the bias, the more likely these people are to be treated as authentic voices rather than compromised ones.

We are constantly told this is just passion.

It is not. Passion is fine. Bias is something else.

In other countries, former players go into punditry and, at their best, behave like professionals. We all know who they played for. We know where their loyalties once sat. But if you dropped into the middle of a broadcast without that knowledge, you would not always be able to guess.

That is the mark of someone doing the job properly.

They can criticise their old club and praise rivals. They can analyse a game without making every sentence sound like it came straight off a supporters’ bus.

Scottish football does not work like that.

Here, old loyalties often drive the whole show. The pundit booth does not always serve analysis. Too often, it feels as though tribalism gets people the job; it is certainly not their smarts or their ability to offer a fresh perspective.

The same assumptions keep shaping the same discussions.

That matters because the Scottish football media ecosystem is packed with former Ibrox players and figures whose emotional investment is no secret.

That does not mean every one of them fails to offer fair comment. It does not mean they should be barred from speaking. But it does mean we should stop pretending this culture has no effect on how people discuss the game.

It has a huge effect.

We see it in the tone and in the framing. We see it in what people pursue and what they quietly bury. It shows in the way some incidents become moral crusades while others get dismissed as unfortunate misunderstandings.

The Scottish media knows who its core audience is, and panders to them. That’s the simple but brutal truth of it, and we all know this is a fact.

You can see the effects of it everywhere, especially in the current ticket standoff and the events at Ibrox which helped bring us here.

Scottish football still has not had the honest media conversation it should have had about what happened, why it happened and why Celtic had every right to take the position it did.

Instead, old loyalties and old grievances shape too much of the coverage. A desperate need to keep audiences onside drives it as well. They dress it up as balance, but it stops being journalism when facts get ignored.

If something happens, say it. If a club has serious questions to answer, ask them. And if supporter safety is at risk, do not hide behind vague language and derby-day mythology.

That is where pundit loyalties matter. They shape the atmosphere around these conversations.

When someone cannot even show happiness that his current club has won a huge game, how can we believe he can sit in a studio or behind a microphone and offer calm, detached analysis on Celtic, the Ibrox club, refereeing, supporter behaviour, ticket allocations or the title race?

That is not an unfair question. It is the obvious one.

Andy Halliday has never hidden what he is. As a player, he took huge delight in beating Celtic whenever he had the chance. Fair enough.

That is football. He wore his colours openly and with emotion. But that same openness becomes a problem when people present him as a neutral voice.

He is not neutral. He has never been neutral and he does not even appear to want to be neutral. So let us stop pretending.

This is not just about Halliday either. He is simply the latest and most visible example because the Motherwell footage gave us the perfect contrast.

Welsh is on loan. He knows where his parent club is. He knows what Celtic are chasing. But he still celebrated Motherwell’s win like it mattered to the team he’s at now, because it did matter. That is professionalism.

Halliday’s reaction, by contrast, looked grim.

Nobody is saying he has to jump around like a man who has just won the Champions League. But when your current team wins at Ibrox and your face says tragedy, people are entitled to notice. They are also entitled to ask what it tells us about the wider culture in our game, and particularly our media and how it frames events.

Scottish football does not need pundits who pretend they have no history. That would be absurd.

But it does need pundits who can rise above that history.

It needs people capable of examining events without first checking how it affects the club they really care about.

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