Sky Sports Scotland Almost Had Me Wondering If Celtic Was In Crisis Yesterday.

Regular readers will be well aware of my “disdain” – the right word I think – for Sky Sports Scotland and its pitiful coverage. Yesterday we got a clear reminder as to why so many of us feel that way about them; they were dreadful and they were biased.

Yesterday they had both the games, the one at Dens and the one at St Mirren. The first, of course, was the one involving the Ibrox club. And they were awful. They were absolutely stinking. They survived a late rally when St Mirren were chasing an equaliser. Yet at the end of the game the commentary team did everything but shower them in kisses.

Skip forward a few hours and our win over Dundee was greeted in a very different fashion. It was all about how Celtic had hung on for a win, how we’d rode our luck … absolute garbage, I’m afraid. I didn’t think we played well yesterday and that’s on the record; I thought we were comfortably the better team of the two.

The impression grows that there are whole swathes of the media who are just dying for us to fail, even some of the so-called neutrals.

Perhaps they believe that having one team win the title every year is bad for the game; it didn’t destroy football in Germany, or Italy did it? There are, of course, a lot of them who just hate Celtic – as I said yesterday, the Sunday Mail’s resident clown was at it again, and we all know who the others are.

The truth is, neither their side nor ours were particularly good yesterday and both deserve a little bit of stick for that. But the media went into this game looking for signs that we were stuttering; that they are writing that is hardly surprising.

But where was the flowing football fans of the club from Ibrox were promised? Do these people really think the hype of the past week, since the Scottish Cup semi final where Ibrox pummelled a Hearts team which barely tried a leg, was justified after watching that yesterday? As people said to me online, even on an off-day you can see that we offer more and we’re a better side than the one across the city, so Sky’s commentary teams just sound ridiculous when they try to pretend that they look strong whereas we look vulnerable.

Let me say what everyone here already knows; we do look a little vulnerable. We’re definitely not at our best. But when the media is pummelling us this coming week, which they will, for being defensively suspect, you want to tell them to take a proper look at that Ibrox defence yesterday; it was all over the shop.

The manager has dropped Goldson. What are the odds that he’s back for the game against us? Will the hacks even deem that worthy of comment? Will they question whether or not he has the right motivation, after such a public humiliation?

Sky yesterday was like a pro-Ibrox love-in, and we’re used to that from the likes of Boyd, but there was nothing impartial about the dual coverage of the games. It was slanted, it was made to sound as if we were the side who had the truly bad day and that wasn’t the case at all. I never thought we were in any danger of dropping points.

We won that game, and I didn’t hide my disappointment about how we did it when I wrote my match report yesterday. But there are four games left, we’re the on-form team (notice how that phrase has dropped out of common use now, eah?) and we have home advantage in the next two games, which it so happens are the ones that matter most.

These people keep on saying this is going to the wire … you know what? I think we’ll end this in the next 14 days.

Then Sky will be covering a very different event than some of them had expected; another Celtic title party.