If you were to believe some of the media, you might as well give Sevco/Rangers the title now. Why not throw in the other two domestic trophies as well? The new ‘Rangers’, complete with one of England’s favoured sons at the helm, have apparently done enough to convince the media that they’ve closed the gap on Celtic.
Objective observers might find this odd for a team that has only played 9 games, of which 5 have been won and 4 have been drawn. With no disrespect at all to the fourth best teams in Macedonia and Croatia, as well as the second best team in Slovenia, Gerrard’s team’s biggest test has been in the Premiership against a tired and stretched Aberdeen side, which were coming off a gruelling second leg against Burnley, the seventh best team in the English Premier League. The Rangers have only played two league games, the draw against Aberdeen and a 2-0 home victory over St Mirren. It’s hardly been electric.
And you wouldn’t expect it to be. Steven Gerrard has less experience than their previously inexperienced manager Graeme Murty, though Gerrard has had considerably more resources at his disposal than both Murty and the hapless Pedro Caixinha. But, in a make believe world where Scotland had a media that wasn’t packed full of writers and pundits who have been waiting for the Messianic rebirth of the club that died in 2012 in a flurry of malfeasance, shame and potential criminality, you’d expect these results to be met with some level of moderation and perspective.
After all, it was only a mere 3 months ago that Brendan Rodgers’ Celtic were winding up an historic and unprecedented double treble. It was only in mid-December last year that Celtic’s record-breaking 69-game unbeaten domestic run came to an end, with defeat at Tynecastle, our first defeat since May 2016. In fact, if you want to set an entirely fair scene here, it was only three months ago that Brendan Rodgers faced his first and only domestic home defeat as Celtic manager – even among our so-called ‘crisis’, you can pick out the astonishing fact that our back-to-back defeats by AEK Athens and then Hearts represented Rodgers’ first ever back-to-back defeats as manager of the Hoops.
This is not some self-affirming boasting or chest-pumping in the face of a few hard weeks for Celtic fans, nor is it a deflection from the fact that we’ve hit a few bumps in the road of late, but keen followers of Scottish football will have noticed that the general media narrative of a resurgent Rangers is indelibly tied to the absurd idea of the imminent, nay catastrophic, decline of Celtic.
To say that the media has been gleeful at Celtic’s misfortunes, whether it’s getting knocked out of the Champions League or losing out on John McGinn, is a bit of an understatement. Since the Athens result, the media, with the almost comically bad Daily Record leading the way, has been saturated in a form delusional schadenfreude directed towards Celtic.
First they said, and clearly hoped, that Rodgers was on the verge of quitting due to the allegedly interrelated trauma of not signing McGinn and losing to AEK. Then, when this turned out to be unadulterated bollocks, they then claimed Celtic would have to offload a few of its best players, namely Tierney, Ntcham and Dembele, to make up for the financial shortfall of missing out on the Champions League – something immediately dismissed by Celtic.
Again, at the risk of repetition, it was all just bollocks. But it wasn’t just bollocks. It was also wishful thinking of titanic proportions. It’s perfectly true that people have a tendency to wait for the mighty to fall, but that isn’t what’s happening at Celtic. The might are not falling. What’s happened in the past few weeks is the normal kind of shenanigans that afflict most normal football clubs in the world. The manager and the board have had some kind of rift over transfer policy, a rift that seems to be healing more every day.
Though I’ve not been happy with certain happenings at Celtic, and, as should always be the caveat, I fully support the right of the free media to report on things, even negative things, occurring in and around Celtic, if this is our big crisis, I’ll take it every day of the week. Especially compared to the state of our rivals.
It’s not as if we have a tax-exile convicted fraudster chairman who breaches takeover rules by not having the financial capabilities to buy the necessary shares in his own club, and who seems to only visit Scotland to appear in court. It’s not as if we’re a commercial sports franchise that can’t even sell its own merchandise. It’s not as if our fans are stabbing fans visiting our country or attacking fans in their own country. It’s not as if our manager has to come out after getting a bad result and appeal to the most base, knuckle-dragging, siege-mentality, conspiracy theory nonsense about referees having it in for The Rangers.
There’s little doubt in my mind that Celtic, with a fully fit squad, would have triumphed over AEK Athens. Even with a makeshift team in the second leg, we dominated the game. If we had a fully fit Dembele and Edouard, I think we would have won. The press would have had to sit on their hands and await another opportunity for their ‘CELTIC IN MELTDOWN’ hysteria.
But this doesn’t mean that Celtic don’t need to strengthen to advance in European terms – with Boyata unlikely and unworthy to ever wear the hoops again after tomorrow, there is talk of Dutch international Jeffrey Bruma coming in for a fee in the region of £7 million (unfounded and untrue story), while Celtic have had a preliminary bid of £3.5million for Aberdeen’s Scott McKenna rejected. I think Celtic could do with another box-to-box midfielder, as I don’t see any natural cover for Ntcham in our squad. Celtic’s evolution, in terms of transfers, and the cause of this rift between Rodgers and Lawwell, was the need to strengthen to advance in Europe – domestically speaking, there is not that much work to be done.
The point is, fully fit, our squad is stronger than our city rivals without reinforcements – come the 2nd of September, we will have a stronger squad. When this reality hits home – and it will hit home – expect a combination of volte faces and butthurt petulance from the media.
There are those who will say that I am indulging conspiracy theories by criticising the wishful catastrophism of the media regarding Celtic’s bump in the road, but it’s hardly a secret that, historically, ‘Rangers’ have been Scotland’s Great British establishment side. To quote a formulation from Four Four Two magazine regarding the dynamic in Scotland between the O*d F*rm, Rangers were described as ‘dour’ and ‘establishment’, while Celtic were considered ‘bohemian’ and ‘underprivileged’.
No manager in Scottish football history, including the legendary Jock Stein who won 9-in-a-row and the European Cup without relying on fraudulent tax-avoidance schemes and dodgy deals with the Bank of Scotland, has received as easy a ride from the media as Walter Smith did in both his managerial stints at Ibrox. One must never forget it was this media that declared Craig Whyte, or the ‘White Knight’ as they literally called him, to be ‘a Billionaire Scottish entrepreneur’ when he was at best a Thousandaire. The media didn’t do their jobs in exposing not just White or the much worse corruption and financial misconduct under the Murray regime because they wanted the Queen’s 11 to be Simply the Best – no matter what it took.
If you lived through the 1990s, you lived through an era where every organ of the Scottish establishment willed and expected ‘Rangers’ to win. It’s why the lull in the sycophancy that accompanied the downfall of Old Rangers was met with such comical hostility from ‘tha peepul’ – they couldn’t handle the fact that, for the first time, their own sense of supremacy had been slightly (note the emphasis) undermined by the media.
But it seems that any media shift that accompanied the death of Rangers was only a temporary readjustment. At the first alleged glimpse of weakness in Celtic’s domination, and The Rangers managing to go 9 competitive games, only two of which have been in the Premiership, unbeaten, suddenly we’re rapidly plunging back to the depths of what I like to call full spectrum Traynorism.
In early February this year, when Celtic had a pretty dodgy run of form and with The Rangers enjoying their brief Murty bounce, the Scottish footballing media and punditocracy was aflame with hyperbole. The news leaked in the run up to the league O*d F*rm that their players had cheered when they got drawn against Celtic in the Scottish Cup semi-final, while pundits were predicting The Rangers to win at Ibrox and move within three points of Celtic and possibly catching them and bringing home this literally fabled ‘55’. Of course, we know what happened: an off-form, ten-man Celtic beat them at Ibrox and then annihilated them in the Scottish Cup semi-final.
Broony’s words, as ever, following the victory, cut straight to the point: ‘We always do our talking on the park’.
The media and establishment’s hopes and dreams aside, it will thus be so again come 2 September.
Sam Teàrlach H
CELTIC are going for their 50th League Win this season. All 49 wins to-date have been won fair and square and Celtic historian and author David Potter – a well respected contributor to The Celtic Star too – has written a book titled Celtic – How the League was Won 49 Times.
We have some advance copies available and you get a free copy of another great Celtic book, That Season in Paradise, signed by none other than Lisbon Lion Bertie Auld. Check it out HERE.
