CELTIC found their voice today and issued a statement that was welcomed across the entire Celtic family and brought the entire support full square behind the club.
If you are in charge of dark arts in the game of football that your job might just be to achieve the exact opposite within the camp of your biggest rivals. And when your work is causing your best chance of achieving your goals on the field of play to be completely distracted from the task at hand then you have completely lost the plot and the landscape is being to look like the scene from Catch 22 when the private enterprise operation bombs their own airfield having picked up the contract to do so from the Germans.
And that book is just about as funny as the banter years at Ibrox stretching back to Valentine’s Day in 2012.
The daughter of jazz legend Nat King Cole, Natalie Cole died in December 2015 as the result of heart failure. OK let’s lighten this up a bit and quickly.
Jonathan Ross is currently on some ITV show called the ‘The Masked Singer’ (no me neither) but you can kind of work out from the title that the panel guess who is singing from behind the mask. Apparently Jonathan Ross plumped for Natalie Cole on last weekend’s show, someone who has been dead for over 4 years.
When I read about it I found it rather funny I must say. Both the error and the poor guy having to defend himself in our world of mock indignation. An innocent error and picked up by no-one else despite a production and research team that run to three figures.
Then when I heard about the latest press gaffe from the ‘Rangers’ today my thoughts went to their PR firms head honcho. Jim Traynor.
Bringing this back to remind everyone of the time Jim Traynor interrupted a press conference and started arguing with journalists. Even Warburton was mortified. pic.twitter.com/hRl6WjJjGX
— Rikos (@Rikos67_) February 4, 2020
You see while Jonathan Ross appears to have made a genuine error of judgement, Traynor is doing the equivalent of telling the world ‘The Masked Singer’ really is Natalie Cole even when he’s been gently advised of her earlier demise, then trying to get a few pals to back him up and sell it back to us all that we had mis-read the obituary.
OK, who said this on 13 April 2012?
“Some Rangers fans believe the club’s history, which would end with liquidation, must be protected but there is a shameful part of that history which they should want to forget and any newco should make it clear a new beginning means exactly that. A new club open to all from the very beginning.”
Or on 13 June the same year?
“They’ll slip into liquidation within the next couple of weeks with a new company emerging but 140 years of history, triumph and tears, will have ended. No matter how Charles Green attempts to dress it up, a newco equals a new club. When the CVA was thrown out Rangers as we know them died. They were closed and a newco must start from scratch.”
Aye that was too easy wasn’t it? Both from Jim Traynor, when he was writing for and Associate Editor of The Daily Record. A few weeks later the man is Communications Director at Ibrox and from there gets his feet well and truly under the table and gets his Level5PR to deal with press for relations for the club. And ‘the’ Rangers lap it up.
What about this one on 7 February 2013?
“But why is it so many continue write or broadcast that this club is a new club when it is the owners who are new? Is it a lack of basic intelligence or something more sinister?”
Easy this game isn’t it?
The man now charged with peddling the continuation myth is the same guy who spent months telling Scotland they were brown bread. Only in the crazy world of Scottish fitba.
I guess he must know where a few skeletons are buried, who’s slept with who or what and who spends an awful lot of time in the powder room on a night out. All the pesky peccadilloes of the Scottish press in a wee black book and the bigger stuff in a safety deposit box in a top secret location. Allegedly.
How else do you explain the lackeys out there willing to exchange journalistic standards (cough) to peddle a whole load of tripe to the Ibrox hordes, from a man even more two faced than they may or not be with their dearly betrothed?
The latest PR backfire from ‘the’ Rangers in consort this time with SkySports was the Alfredo Morelos heart-to-heart about the tough times he had since arriving in God’s own country.
The genius of the PR trick in what appears to be a stage managed interview (a bit like those crap comedy panel shows where you can tell they already have the answers-just even less funny) is to have Morelos answer in Spanish with English subtitles, except poor Morelos (and I mean that this time) was having the wool pulled over his eyes and appears to have had words not so much put into his mouth as somewhat lost in translation.
Thankfully the Spanish language it turns out isn’t as rare as say Gaelic and is spoken by roughly 437 million people and some of them are Celtic supporters. Soon the truth is out there, followed by a Celtic statement (a proper strong one this time) and the sudden pulling of the interview from Sky’s website. I guess Mr Traynor’s influence didn’t spread to the Alicante CSC.
#celticfc #spfl #football #coybig #celticalicante #hailhail #glasgowsgreenandwhite #monthehoops #europaleague #glasgow #celtic #Morelos
For the full text version, visit @celticalicante on FB.
Thanks everyone for their support. It seems our efforts may be making some headway pic.twitter.com/g4xTIMejzO— Celticalicante (@celticalicante) February 4, 2020
This hot on the heels of the alleged brake tampering on Alfredo’s sports car and the flip-flop chase through the streets, being quickly contradicted by a Sunday exclusive of Mrs Morelos employing a man to not so much tamper with brakes, as fit a tracking device to Alfredo’s motor. Did someone mention sinister earlier?
Add to this the Morelos to Barcelona stories-a personal favourite of mine- as the ideal replacement for Luis Suarez. As what, a stunt double for diving practice?
Then there was the Alfredo Morelos has turned down a £30M move to Chinese Super League club Hebei Fortune – just ahead of the Chinese transfer window closing at 5PM that day and the Chinese club already having their allowed quota of overpaid foreign stars already registered.
Thing is it strikes me that Level5PR reckon that they are too good at their job. No doubt paid per crisis averted by ‘the Rangers board, it appears they are now creating the crisis situations themselves. At such time ‘the’ Rangers desperately need someone to spin the story so they call in-you guessed it Level5PR to re-spin the spin. This Traynor guy may not have scruples but he knows a cash cow when he sees one.
Talking of sinister, has anyone heard from Michael Stewart since last night’s Sportsound? He usually sends a podcast to my Spotify the next day but it didn’t arrive. I wonder what he was talking about this time?
Imposible agradecer a todos los que han estado en contacto hoy, ha sido increíble la variedad de personas que han estado en contacto, pero agradezco cada palabra de apoyo y aliento. Seguiré diciéndolo tal como lo veo. 2/2
— Michael Stewart (@mstewart_23) February 4, 2020
And next week if Jonathan Ross wants to, he can tell his ITV audience that ‘The Masked Singer’ is John Lennon, I know just the man to Twist and Shout about it.
Niall J
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