It doesn’t look good, Guardian. It doesn’t look good at all

Last week’s advert in the Tribune de Geneve was in English, despite the predominant local language being French. The primary target audience were Uefa representatives and functionaries, who are not drawn from the local Nyon catchment area, and will most likely speak English, with secondary target audiences in the UK. I hear both targets were reached.

There was a short-lived chat about which language to run with in Switzerland, but consensus was quickly reached that English was appropriate and sufficient. No translation was ever made.

Very much related to this subject…….

There was an incident when I was at school (many years ago). Two boys had exactly the same maths homework. This would have been fine had the work been correct, but the made exactly the same mistakes, so the teacher had sufficient proof to establish that he didn’t have two independently produced pieces of work.

The class lesson that day was, if you’re going to coordinate a response, you better get your facts right, or you’ll get caught.

Shortly after the Tribune de Geneve advert ran it was brought to my attention that some regularly-hostile-to-Celtic online loons were running with a line that an English advert had been sent to Switzerland and a French advert had been sent to an English newspaper by mistake.

This was fanciful, but not worthy of attention, because as you now know, there was never a French translation of the advert.

You can imagine my utter astonishment, therefore, that The Guardian claimed they didn’t run the advert because it was submitted to them in French, despite, as surely the world now knows, no French language version of the advert ever existing!

“If you’re going to coordinate a response, get your facts right.” It doesn’t look good, Guardian. It doesn’t look good at all. You’ve been caught in PR vice.

You know how PR works in Scottish football. Celtic and most clubs play with a straight bat: “This is the news relating to our games and events”, but there are clubs, personalities and organisations which are only tenable because of expensive and persuasive PR.

You remember the Poppy banner issue, which became news a full two days after a game, by which time PR could persuade journalists to run with a story which until then had no news value. You are only too familiar with some of the vacuous characters ushered into the game by newspapers demanding Lloyds Bank approve a takeover, while PR spun incredible lies about finance and probity.

The next time Celtic, or their manager, is vulnerable on a subject, look out for this Malign Influence.  It battered Ronny Deila when he lost games, and recently went for Peter Lawwell.

My thanks to The Guardian advertising people, who confirmed to us this morning that the advert they received was in English. That’s the other thing about coordinating a Malign Influence, you need to get buy-in from a lot of people!