Tony Watt reveals his ignorance as he blames Rodgers for Celtic’s dreadful season.

I didn’t know Tony Watt was branching out into broadcasting until today, and had a Celtic site not highlighted his inane comments on Brendan Rodgers, I still would not know. I actually suspect I could have lived a good portion of the rest of my life without ever knowing it, and in some ways, I wish I still didn’t.

Over the years, I have heard stories about Tony Watt not being the sharpest tool in the box. I never knew whether those stories were true.

To be honest, I still do not. What I do know is that he is launching his broadcasting career on Radio Clyde, which is not exactly the place you go looking for soaring intellects. On early evidence, his views do nothing to dispel those earlier stories.

One of the oldest tricks in politics is to blame the last guy for everything.

There was a point during the Boris Johnson years when his government was still blaming the last Labour government for problems that were piling up right in front of them. That was brazen enough given how long Labour had been out of office. Blaming Brendan Rodgers for the state of this Celtic team is a little bit like that.

Watt rambled so much that I had to listen to the clip more than once just to be sure he was actually blaming Rodgers for the recruitment in the summer, as one of the sources of the problems we are living with now.

Rodgers himself repeatedly raised recruitment as an issue.

He did it often enough and clearly enough. Watt also talked about the boring football some of Rodgers’ teams played, and the word “some” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, because last season, when we had our best front men doing their jobs, we scored more goals than any Celtic side ever has.

Coincidentally, or maybe not, the slide only really began when we took Kyogo out of the team in February. Kyogo, whom we did not replace. Then we sold Adam Idah and did not replace him. Then we sold Nicolas Kühn and did not replace him.

Let me say that again in case he did not grasp it.

We sold not one but both of our strikers and replaced neither of them. We sold our best attacking midfielder in the summer and did not replace him. Jota was out for the season. Did we replace him? Of course not. But somehow this was all Rodgers’ fault. Perhaps that is how Rodgers wanted it?

That analysis is so brain-dead it barely meets even Clyde’s debased standard.

Rodgers tried to warn people about the crisis that was coming. He flagged it often enough. If Watt is going to be a media personality at all, he is going to have to keep punching Celtic as hard as he can to get any attention, because it is the only way his name is ever going to appear in the news. It certainly will not be because of his rational analysis, because there is no rational analysis here.

Now, saying Rodgers’ teams were sometimes boring to watch is not a criticism that can simply be waved away. The latter part of his final spell was boring to watch.

In fact, at times it was dreadful.

But when your side has been stripped of that much firepower, and when the players themselves realise they are at a club that would rather sabotage the man in the dugout than strengthen the team and help him out, it is bound to have a demoralising effect on everybody involved.

A lot of people talk about this stuff as though it happens in a vacuum. It does not.

If you sell your best players and do not replace them, you are telling the rest of the squad that they are no longer at a club with ambition. They are no longer at a club with high standards. They are no longer at a club that takes itself especially seriously.

If there is no accountability for those failures, then you are also giving players licence to become unaccountable themselves. Standards start at the top, and they filter down.

Blaming Rodgers for the state we are in is like blaming the weather service for the tornado it warned you about.

My favourite part, though, was hearing Watt trash Rodgers’ style of play and then move straight on to praising Martin O’Neill.

I love the guy. He is getting results, and he may even get the results that carry us to a league title. But his January window was as bad as that in the summer. Was he responsible for it? Hell, maybe you want to blame Rodgers for that as well?

More than that; if you want to talk about football that is boring to watch, if you want to talk about football that makes you want to gouge your eyes out so you never have to sit through it again, then look no further than what we are watching now.

So, I find it preposterous for someone to criticise Rodgers’ style and then pretend what we are watching right now is somehow more acceptable.

I know he did not use those exact words, but that is the logic of his position, assuming you can even use the word logic to describe it, which I am reluctant to do except in the most sarcastic sense.

One of the worst things about our media ecosystem is the number of ex-players in it.

Their jaw-dropping stupidity gets dressed up and presented as expertise.

What amazes me is that there does not seem to be any vetting process for these people at all. If you have friends in the media, you can pick up the phone and get yourself a gig. You can start passing yourself off as an informed source.

That is why there are so many of them doing exactly that. It is how you get a media ecosystem filled with the Andy Halliday’s of this world.

This is not even dumbing down anymore.

This is the bottom of the barrel being smashed through with a pickaxe just to see how much lower we can still go.

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