Kasper Hogh needs support. An ex-Celtic striker on his case doesn’t help.

Yesterday, Paulina did a very good piece on Chris Sutton, and I agreed with every word of it.

Big Chris is a true Celtic fan and a true ambassador for this club. But sometimes, because he enjoys the sound of his own voice, he doesn’t always think about what’s coming out of his mouth. Because he thinks his opinions deserve to be heard, he doesn’t always think about what the impact of those opinions will be.

Chris is very good at analysing certain things that are going on at Celtic. Chris is not very good at analysing the game itself.

This is an oddity, because a lot of players are very tactically aware and very good at that. They know a lot about basic football strategy.

They’ve sat in coaching sessions. They’ve sat and listened to top managers, so they know more about the game than the average fan does.

They have baseline knowledge which would embarrass just about any pundit in the country. Some football players know a lot about football.

There are basically two kinds of ex-footballer pundit. There are those who are very, very knowledgeable and talk in detail about tactics and technique and all sorts of other stuff. Then there are people who bring a knowledge of dressing-room culture and the experience of their own careers into the studio with them.

Those guys are entertaining to listen to, but you don’t learn very much from them.

Many of the guys with the real in-depth knowledge don’t go into punditry. They go into coaching and management. Sutton did that for a time. He was manager at Lincoln City for a while, with his intimidating win rate of around 28%.

I’m not going to say that he knows nothing about coaching. I’m not going to say that a man who played at the highest level in the game doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But he hasn’t been back in the dugout, and in my view, he is much better suited to the job he does now. There is a difference between doing that job and organising a football team.

I wish there were ten Chris Suttons in the media: ten ex-Celts who are unafraid to tell the truth about the way our club is run.

But I do wish that the Chris Sutton we have was a little more understanding of the players we have, a little more knowledgeable about the mechanics of the game and a little more sympathetic, especially to players who play in the position he played in.

If he believes that Kasper Høgh is not applying himself enough, that Kasper Høgh is not doing the fundamentals that a striker does, he wants to think about the difference between his time at Blackburn and his time at Chelsea, and between his time at Chelsea and his time at Celtic. None of his successes or failures were just about application.

All of it was about style. It was about playing in the right system.

Sutton would have been furious at any former Chelsea player who criticised him during that period when he was struggling badly to make an impact there. The reason Sutton didn’t make an impact there was as simple as could be: Chelsea did not know how to play to Sutton’s strengths.

Sutton doesn’t compare himself to Kasper Høgh. He is at least smart enough to realise that the two are very different players. So, I wonder why he expects Høgh to do the kind of job he did. That is not the guy’s strength, and unless we play to his strengths, we’re going to ruin not just the player but the £11 million we invested in him.

Chris Sutton wants to spend a little more time pondering the things he doesn’t understand. It’s painfully obvious that the problem is not that Høgh is failing to make enough chances or do enough work. O’Neill can be as critical as he wants, but sometimes it is the job of the players around someone like Kasper to put the ball on a plate for him.

Yes, he has to make his own spaces. But I’ve seen him try to do that, only to find that the final ball isn’t there. Only to find that the delivery sucks. Only to find that he’s making runs into places where other players in the team don’t anticipate him ending up.

Ironically, it is a player much closer to Kasper in style and type who recognises it and stood up for him.

Incredibly, I am going to praise the Village Idiot, because he at least understands what certain strikers are good at. He was a penalty-box finisher, just like Kasper.

Kris Boyd never scored goals at the level Kasper has in the biggest club competition in football. Most of Boyd’s goals came right here in Scotland. He had a brief time in England where he was a complete flop. But here in this country, he knew how to find the net, and he did it over and over again.

Martin O’Neill is trying to turn Kasper into Chris Sutton.

No player should find that more unfair than Sutton himself. No player should be more frustrated watching that than Sutton himself.

I don’t think Chris Sutton understands everything about football that he should know to comment so freely on our team as he sometimes does.

As Paulina has said, he made a royal fool of himself last season when he completely wrote off our chances of winning the title. He ruled us out and said we could not win all five games after the split. But on this one, I expect him to be on firmer ground. He knows the type of player he himself was, and he must know Kasper’s not that.

I understand that part of his job is to be controversial. But undermining a Celtic player who needs a little bit of support? Who needs people to take a step back and ask whether he is really to blame for the predicament he finds himself in? Instead of doing that, Sutton would rather lay it on thick and criticise the player.

Not everything is down to the playing squad. Not everything is down to the footballers. There are knee-jerk reactions galore when it comes to new Celtic signings, and new Celtic striker signings in particular. There are always knee-jerk reactions.

If we had created numerous chances at the weekend and Kasper had fluffed them, failed to take them, whatever else, the criticism would be valid. But we didn’t give that guy a sniff. We played high balls to a lone striker, expecting him to wrestle with the defence and make something happen without the support he needed.

Even Sutton in his day, a much closer prototype to the type of player you can play that sort of game with, wouldn’t have been able to get any change out of the Ibrox defence effectively playing up there on his own.

Is it too much to ask that he consider the situation Kasper finds himself in? Is it too much to expect from a guy who’s been in that position himself, and knows what it’s like, that he offers the guy support instead of being critical?

Because Sutton knows one thing above all else.

He knows that “ex-Celtic striking icon Chris Sutton criticises Celtic striker” is a major news story that puts a striker and the whole team under even greater pressure. He knows that because this is the business he’s in now, and he understands it far better than he understands coaching and styles and tactics.

He knows that all he’s done is convince more people that our big striker is doing everything wrong.

It’s not too much to ask, surely, that he set aside his own ego for just five minutes and offer the guy a little support.

And if that is too much to ask, then Sutton and a lot of us are going to have a major falling-out, because it’s lamentable conduct and there is no excuse for it.

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