Our man’s insider was spot on with his prediction after the Hoops were beaten at Motherwell earlier this week
13:33, 04 Jan 2026Updated 19:47, 04 Jan 2026
Wilfried Nancy(Image: Kirk O’Rourke/Rangers FC/Shutterstock)
The time was three minutes past ten o’clock on Tuesday night.
The text message was from an impeccable source.
It came from the man who told me that Motherwell would beat Celtic at Fir Park because, stylistically, they would simply have too much for their visitors.
That was why I wrote in this column last weekend that I had it on good authority Jens Berthel Askou would get the better of Wilfried Nancy.
Fifteen minutes after the final whistle had blown in North Lanarkshire the good authority messaged me to say: “I told you.”
Andy Halliday, my sometime radio colleague and Motherwell player, was seeing out the old year by proving good-natured banter was still an allowable, and welcome, pastime.
How welcome it was to have a smile put on my face at that precise moment was something Andy couldn’t possibly have known about.
Earlier in the day I had attended the funeral of a six-year-old child, the son of my wife’s niece.
The boy was someone this newspaper had tried to help by increasing awareness of his fight for survival, highlighting the need to raise £250,000 towards his essential cancer treatment.
A week before he was due to go to America for the pioneering surgery that would have given him a chance of getting better, the child relapsed and his condition worsened.
The moral of the story is about perspective.
Keeping your priorities in order means you can have a good laugh, or even a good argument, about football while understanding it is not a matter of life or death.
Not even remotely close to it.
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Andy Halliday
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