Yesterday, I parodied the Redknapp Celtic manager story. Then The Sun wrote it.

There are people who occasionally ask me why I spend so much time on The CelticBlog writing about the media, and bringing up all the shady things it does. The lack of standards. The nonsense. The endless flannel dressed up as news.

The answer is simple. Someone has to.

The media in Scottish football is dire. Their standard is awful. The nonsense they come up with is almost beyond compare. I’ve already written about two different stories today that are nothing but media invention, and I’ve got another one to write later on.

There are a couple of little series on this site.

The Fear and Loathing series is about Ibrox in crisis, and the fact that there are so many of them, and that I’ve written so many over the years, is a testament to how much crisis has swirled around and through that club.

The other regular series is Keith Jackass, my Scottish media spoof column. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have asked me if the Keith Jackass stories are real, because they have read them and recognised, in them, Scottish mainstream journalism.

Listen, I try to make those stories as improbable, ridiculous and over the top as I possibly can. I do that so nobody can mistake them for reality. In the latest one, I have Hugh Keevins admitting that even if Celtic hired Pep Guardiola and promised him an unlimited budget, he would still write a negative story.

In what universe is he ever going to say that? Even if we all know, broadly speaking, that it is true.

Yes, it’s exaggerated. Yes, it is an exaggerated version of the truth, pushed beyond where the exaggeration should reasonably go. And still people ask me if it is real.

That is not about the credulity of the readers.

That is about the state of Scottish sports journalism.

Even the most absurd Keith Jackass story can sound plausible in this environment. I once wrote one about how the Joe Biden White House conspired with the Ukrainians and UEFA to make sure the Ibrox club went out of Europe because it served the war against Russia. That is about as absurd and crazy a stretch as I could possibly have made. Yet there were still some people who wondered if the story had appeared in a Scottish mainstream publication.

That tells you everything.

I had not done a Keith Jackass story for a while until yesterday. But the Harry Redknapp meeting with Peter Lawwell at Easter Road was just too good not to parody. I did not expect anyone to write the real version of that story.

Then this morning, The Sun did.

The Sun actually asked Harry Redknapp if that was what the meeting was about, and now apparently Redknapp has had to address the rumours.

What rumours? What story?

Did anyone actually believe there was any possibility, however remote, that this was a meeting about the Celtic job? That Redknapp was meeting Lawwell and being sounded out about taking the gig?

I ran with what I thought was the most ridiculous premise possible because that is what the Jackass stories are. They are based on the most ridiculous possible interpretation of events. You do not expect to read the real-life version of the story.

That is the whole point. And yet here we are.

I didn’t even think our media would join the dots, add one and one together, and get 16 in the way they have here. It seems impossible to me that serious people in the journalism business sat in an office and pondered whether that might be the secret behind the meeting.

There is actually a much more serious side to this, and I’m going to get to that in a separate piece because it is not for discussing here. But it is not about Harry Redknapp. I don’t know what Redknapp was doing at the game. I don’t know what Lawwell was doing at the game.

But he wasn’t sounding out Redknapp to become Celtic’s next manager.

The Keith Jackass stories are supposed to be too ridiculous to take seriously.

But this is not the first time something I’ve written in one of them, something I thought was too preposterous even for our media, has actually wound up in the mainstream press as they follow some crazy theory down one of their many rabbit holes.

On one occasion, I took a Keith Jackson Celtic story that was so absurd I wrote it as a Jackass piece without changing a single word. It fitted the series perfectly.

And right there is your answer.

That is why I write about these people. When I struggle to satirise them, when no matter how far off the board I think I have gone, they still manage to get there eventually on their own, then we have a real problem.

No matter how ridiculous I try to be, I can never be entirely sure it will come over as parody, because this is the level people expect from them. And very often, horribly often, they meet that standard.

This story is no exception.

“Harry Redknapp in talks to become Celtic boss” was the joke. The real joke is that some people in the Scottish press corps took the idea seriously.

That makes you want to give up writing satire completely.

The writers of The Thick of It said they knew it was time to stop when politics itself became so absurd that nothing they could think of was too ridiculous to be impossible. After this, I know exactly how they felt.

When Scottish football journalism starts publishing the punchline before I can write the parody, there may be nowhere left for satire to go.

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