PAISLEY, SCOTLAND – FEBRUARY 10: BBC Sport pundit Andy Halliday during a Scottish Gas Men’s Scottish Cup match between St Mirren and Hearts at the SMiSA Stadium, on February 10, 2025, in Paisley, Scotland. (Photo by Ross MacDonald/SNS Group via Getty Images)

Andy Halliday might be one of the stupidest people in Scotland.

I don’t know. The competition is fierce amongst his peer group. But he has certainly said things in the past day that make your ears prick up and then the laughter rise in your chest until you can no longer contain it.

But I knew someone would break, and it is probably not a surprise to see who it was.

How many times have I said that this tendency amongst our media to hire any former footballer who fancies a broadcasting or writing gig is what dumbs down the press and makes people like me so contemptuous of the whole profession?

It does them no good. It is why some of us have full-time jobs covering the media as much as we cover the rest of the game.

Because the media is part of the story now.

More and more, it is part of the problem.

Although this blog and other Celtic sites pointed out how preposterous it would be to pretend that the Ibrox club had some special motivation going into this weekend’s game that they somehow did not have in the previous two matches, I knew someone would go there.

They held out for almost the full week.

The temptation to invent motivation for the Ibrox club in the most puerile and pitiful way was always going to be too much for some of them to resist. But I never expected anyone to put it in the terms Andy Halliday did.

He suggested that stopping Celtic from winning the title was the trophy the Ibrox club could win if it gets a result on Sunday.

He actually said this. I am not making it up. I wish my imagination was that good.

This morning, I wrote a spoof piece called Fear And Loathing At The Ballot Box. I thought I would take advantage of two simultaneous facts: the elections were yesterday, and former Ibrox fan media darling Craig Houston was running in them.

It was too good an opportunity to miss.

I thought I wrote a pretty good piece because I made sure it was as unbelievable and preposterous as possible. I painted the protagonist, Colin, in the most unflattering light imaginable and made him far stupider than even the dumbest member of the Union Brats could possibly be.

But I should know better than to assume I can still satirise these people. I don’t know how many times I have thought I had gone to the extremes where real life could not possibly follow, only for comments like Halliday’s to appear. They make Colin from my story sound not only plausible by comparison, but perhaps the intelligent one.

If you limited the sample size to Colin and Andy Halliday, then to be blunt, my Union Brat idiot sounds like a freaking genius.

“One thing is for sure: I think there is going to be plenty of drama,” Halliday said about a game that one would presume was always going to have some of that. Then came the gem. “(Ibrox’s) trophy now is to make sure that Celtic don’t win the league.”

Maybe that is why they still have a trophy cabinet over at Ibrox after all these years of poverty in terms of tangible success. Maybe they have filled it with phantom honours, phantom awards and invented silverware instead of the actual real stuff that team captains not called James Tavernier occasionally get their hands on.

I knew there were enough dumb people in the media that one of them would still pretend there was some special incentive, above and beyond the thrill of winning the trophy for yourself. But I never expected it to be described as an actual trophy.

And the thing is, this did not appear on some fringe radio show or some bizarre podcast where the common denominator is the low IQ of everyone involved.

This was on the BBC. This was on the national broadcaster.

They let him get away with saying that without pulling him up on the language, or on how preposterous the argument is.

There may be incentives for that club to win tomorrow.

Of course there are. But they are not incentives on the same level as doing enough to challenge for the trophy on your own behalf.

There may be people in the Ibrox support who will find some satisfaction at the end of the season if Celtic’s name is not engraved on the prize.

But for the most part, everyone knows how dumb this argument is.

The national broadcaster apparently does not care.

Apparently, the national broadcaster does not have any standards to speak of. If it did, Andy Halliday would not be anywhere near its shows. He would not be allowed to open his mouth and say such stupid stuff without someone at least asking the obvious follow-up.

It is embarrassing for him. It is embarrassing for them.

And it is wearying for the rest of us, except in that it gives us something to mock, laugh at and poke with a stick. A trophy for stopping someone else winning the league.

Dear God. I should give up writing parody.

I remember when Armando Iannucci spoke about why they stopped doing The Thick Of It. He said they were no longer able to keep up with the insanity and perversity of actual politics. Nothing they could write as satire was going to come close to the age of unreality we were living in. I sometimes feel the same way about Scottish football.

You can’t satirise these people because so many of them are shockingly capable of being more stupid than the stupidest invention any imagination can conjure up.

Maybe that is a failure of imagination on my part.

But I don’t think so. Because when a former Ibrox player sits on the BBC and says that stopping Celtic winning the title is now a “trophy” for his favourite club, you wonder if parody or satire have anywhere left to go.

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