The Brown-Keane story is the kind of ridiculous nonsense Celtic fans are used to.

Our media is very good at one thing, and it isn’t writing the news, as all Celtic fans are well aware. It is gossip.

It has become very good at gossip because gossip is really all it practises. The big gossip story in the papers at the moment is about Scott Brown going over to Hungary and meeting Robbie Keane, who is coaching at Ferencvaros.

From this, we are supposed to infer that Keane will be the manager. Brown will be an assistant of some sort. Martin O’Neill will be director of football.

All of this from news of a single meeting, broken by former Hearts boss Csaba Laszlo, and then inflated into a story about who our next boss is going to be.

When you break this story down to its particulars, there are none.

What does Laszlo himself say? Brown was over there for a coaching course, and the meeting was in relation to that. There is no indication, no hint, that it was about anything else except two men meeting on a training course and doing a little catching up.

There is no indication anywhere that Celtic has spoken to Keane or is interested in speaking to Keane. Scott Brown does not work for Celtic in any capacity at all. The Keith Jackass story I posted yesterday about Lawwell sitting with Harry Redknapp has more teeth than this one does, because Lawwell is at least the former chairman.

As I said yesterday, I listen very carefully to the way people talk, the things they say and the things they do. When I listen to O’Neill, I hear a guy who is not leaving at the end of the season. I hear a guy who knows he is staying beyond that, and who is already building for a team beyond that.

I think we are all being led up the garden path.

Everyone who wants the Motherwell boss is going to be disappointed. I think everyone who wants Keane is going to be disappointed. I think everyone who doesn’t want either of them, and I don’t want either of them, is going to be disappointed anyway.

Because I think the manager next season is the guy in the dugout right now.

That particular story, I’ll deal with if we have confirmation of it. I’ll deal with it when I have to. I just don’t want to think about how I’m going to respond to it at the moment.

It won’t be with joy in my heart.

The one positive is that it would end all of the nonsense we’re hearing elsewhere and bring this little gossip circle to a close.

I mean, I’ve never known a media so willing to dream up scenarios out of the most oblique things and pretend they have substance. This story has none.

Laszlo has already explained what the meeting was. This was not a sounding-out meeting. You don’t send a former player to do your bidding in that situation. You send in the heavyweights, the money guys and the lawyers.

Otherwise, you look amateurish. You look second-rate. And I know we are both amateurish and second-rate in some respects, but surely not so amateurish and second-rate that we need Scott Brown to do this for us.

That’s what I said earlier today about McAvennie. He was not claiming that he knows what is going on inside Celtic. He was talking about what he thinks might be happening in relation to Reo Hatate and the manager.

This is very similar.

Laszlo is not the one claiming that this was about the Celtic manager’s job. The media is taking his innocuous comments and trying to turn them into something they are not.

One report this morning said speculation continues to grow. Yes, that tends to happen when you keep feeding it.

Sometimes journalists do have to work with fragments of a story, just as lawyers sometimes have to work with what we would call circumstantial evidence. But our hacks take it way beyond that.

When there is no news to write, they have no problem inventing it out of whole cloth.

All they have done here is find little fragments and weave them together. Scott Brown has no job and he defended the Celtic board. Scott Brown needs a new gig and he was over on a coaching course, which managers out of work have plenty of time to do.

From there, they just run.

Here is what is frustrating about this.

The story should sound absurd on the face of it. Some quarters push suggestions about how this so-called Celtic dream team will fit together, but anyone should dismiss them as the ravings of an overexcited hack who has taken invention a step too far.

But in fact, it is all too easy to believe that the board might try to sell some dream-team scenario involving three people with former connections to the club and dress it up as a triumph, no matter who those three people were.

That is the problem.

It is a nonsense story, but it lives in an environment where nonsense too often becomes plausible.

I look at all the names regularly in the media, and I don’t want any of them. That includes the present manager, who I think this club has squeezed every last drop out of that it can get.

The best thing Celtic can do for Martin O’Neill is let him finish this season, hopefully on a triumphant note, and then go. Let him leave knowing that he did an incredible job dragging this team off its knees and turning them back into champions.

The obvious question is then asked: if not these guys, who? Like someone is paying me £1 million to make that decision. I’m the wrong guy. That’s Nicholson you should be asking. He gets the big money to make that call.

But in terms of the names currently being mentioned, and the question of who I want, I can only say this: someone else.

Not anyone else, obviously. We should still have standards. We should have an acceptable minimum for what the next Celtic boss should look like. But my preference would be someone with no connection to this club at all.

Celtic does not need to stay stuck in the mud. It certainly does not need to go backwards. This club needs forward motion. It needs a full-scale revolution.

You don’t get that with Scott Brown, Martin O’Neill and Robbie Keane. That sounds like more of the same. Familiarity. People wedded to the current system.

As dreadful as these stories are as journalism, the unfortunate fact is that we cannot dismiss them as impossible. We are just that limited in our thinking, and that is the kind of result such thinking might actually produce.

That is what worries me most.

Not that this particular story is true.

But that, at Celtic, something this daft can still sound horribly believable.

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