Regular readers will know that I am not Frank McAvennie’s number one fan.

I think the guy is a moron. I think he is our equivalent of the Village Idiot, Kris Boyd, across the city. They are about on the same intellectual level, and they bring roughly the same level of insight.

The difference is that Boyd has somehow managed to make it onto mainstream television, while McAvennie has not even managed that. He is exactly where he belongs, on the fringes of the discussion.

And although he is, as anyone who constantly comments on the game can claim to be, correct on a number of things, more often than not this is someone simply not worth paying attention to at all.

Except on a night like tonight.

He was speaking on his podcast about Auston Trusty taking time off last month because of the death of his father and then being allowed further time away to return to the United States for the funeral.

And his comments are so crass, so ignorant, so abhorrent that I can scarcely believe what I am reading when I see the transcripts of them.

McAvennie said: “I’ve got every respect for that, but how long do you want off?”

He then went on: “Celebrate the life? You’ve got football. You’re getting paid and we’re in trouble. How long is it going to be?”

And when the host pushed back, McAvennie doubled down.

“It’s the woke brigade now isn’t it. It’s nonsense. My dad was the best man, the only man I looked up to when he died, but you’ve got to get on with it.”

That is not insight. That is not hard-headed realism. That is not some old-school football truth that the rest of us are supposedly too soft to understand.

It is just callous.

To start ranting about the “woke brigade” because a man has been given time to grieve and attend his father’s funeral makes McAvennie sound less like a wannabee pundit and more like some third-rate Reform councillor searching for a culture-war angle in a family tragedy.

And the question of how long Trusty “needs off” is not really McAvennie’s business anyway. It has an obvious answer too; as long as he thinks he needs.

Celtic are his employers. Celtic know the circumstances. Celtic made the decision. And Celtic, in this instance, have handled the situation with exactly the sensitivity and respect it deserved. At a time when I am kicking the daylights out of this club’s board and senior management for almost everything they do, I am not going to condemn them when they get something right. On this, they have, all the way.

Their attitude has been exemplary. There are things bigger than football. There are things more important than the game, and more important than a handful of performances and results. Bereavement is one of them.

Trusty does not need to ask Frank McAvennie for permission to grieve. He does not have to ask him to decide what an acceptable mourning period looks like. And he certainly does not owe anybody an explanation for attending his own father’s funeral.

What is perhaps most depressing about McAvennie’s comments is the ease with which the word “woke” gets dragged into something like this, as though basic compassion has somehow become a political position.
Giving a man time to bury his father is not ideological. It is not left-wing, right-wing, woke, anti-woke or anything else. It is human. That should not be controversial.

And the fact that someone can look at a family bereavement and immediately reduce it to “you’re getting paid” tells you everything about the poverty of the argument and the way their own mind works. I didn’t expect McAvennie ever to manifest as some unrecognised genius, but this … Good God man.

Footballers are employees, yes. They are also sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, partners and human beings. The wage packet does not cancel any of that out.

And Celtic being in trouble does not magically transform Trusty’s grief into an inconvenience that ought to be scheduled around the fixture list.

Our problems are much bigger than the absence of one footballer, and the fact that we are not willing to cut short his process in dealing with this because we are in some trouble is something for which we should be commended, and condemning the player himself for taking the necessary time is pretty disgusting.

That is the part I cannot get past.

The idea that because the team is struggling, because results are bad, because people are angry and frustrated, somehow that creates an obligation on a grieving player to get back to work quickly enough to satisfy a former player sitting behind a microphone.

There has to be a line somewhere. Like around the idea of common decency maybe? If we have reached the point where allowing someone to attend his father’s funeral is being held up as evidence of football going soft, then the problem is not football.

The problem is the person saying it.

And for all the criticism I have levelled at Celtic this season, there is no criticism from me here. They did the right thing. They treated Auston Trusty like a human being instead of an asset on a spreadsheet. They gave him the space to deal with something which matters infinitely more than football.

That should be the end of the matter.

Frank McAvennie has, of course, offered a mealy mouthed apology for these moronic remarks.

That has gone down about as well as the remarks themselves.

To be blunt, he’s better ignored. He can think whatever he likes about modern football, modern players and whatever he imagines the “woke brigade” to be.

But there are some moments when you would be better served by saying nothing at all and if was smart enough to have worked that out then he wouldn’t have made those comments in the first place.

If he was not a self-obsessed twat it wouldn’t have dawned on him to.

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