Who exactly offered £22m for Chermiti? A verbal bid, apparently ‘booted out’ by a club that has spent all summer. Imagine Celtic ‘booting’ out a bid of over £20 mill?

Yesterday, Ally McCoist went on talkSPORT and told the nation that Youssef Chermiti’s injury is an absolute disaster.

He then told them he didn’t even want to talk about it.

For a man who talks for a living, that’s quite the admission.

Here is what the Ibrox legend had to say on the situation:

Youssef Chermiti’s injury is a disaster. An absolute disaster. I think the rumours were that they’d been offered £23-24m for him.

I don’t even want to talk about it, and it just dismays me. It’s a massive blow for the boy, and I’m gutted for him, of course.

But in terms of the club itself, there’s no other word for it than a disaster. That’s all you can say.

Now, before I go any further, let me be fair about the part of that which is fair.

The football bit is spot on.

An ACL at 22 years of age is a horrible thing to happen to any young player.

Nobody with a heart wants to watch a boy lose most of a season in one afternoon, and I’m not about to start.

So on that, McCoist gets no argument from me.

It’s everything wrapped around it that I have a problem with.

Who exactly offered £22 to £24 million for Youssef Chermiti, because nobody in our wonderful media has thought to ask

The reports say it was Galatasaray.

They say a bid in the region of £22 million was booted out by the Ibrox side.

McCoist has it at £23-24 million.

So we’re already £2 million adrift and we’ve only had two people count it.

Which is it then?

But here’s the funny part.

It was a verbal offer.

A verbal offer.

Not a bid lodged, not a fee agreed, not a medical arranged, not a solitary sheet of paper anywhere near it – a phone call.

And on the strength of a phone call, the entire Scottish game is expected to nod along and accept that the Ibrox side said no thanks.

Aye, right.

Ask yourself what happens at Celtic Park the moment somebody so much as breathes the number £20 million

We all know fine well what happens.

The board practically need a lie down.

And don’t say we turned a £20 million+ offer down for Arne Engels last January, because we all know there would have been hell to pay if he had been sold then considering the state we were in.

Once that offer came in, we always knew he was gone come the summer.

The absent meddling golfer alaways gets his pound of flesh, the accountants get their net profit, and the player is halfway to an airport before the support has finished reading the tweet.

And that’s a club sitting on a fortune with no debt against it.

That’s us, with money in the bank and not a single reason to be frightened of anybody.

If our lot can’t hold their nerve from that position, what chance has a club still paying for last summer?

Yet we’re now supposed to believe the Ibrox side looked at £22 million for their prize striker and told Galatasaray to sling it?

Make no mistake, that is what’s being sold here.

A club that has spent what they have spent since June does not boot out an offer of that size

It doesn’t happen.

You don’t run the supermarket sweep McInnes has been running all summer, twelve bodies and counting, and then wave away one of the biggest fees your club has ever been offered.

Especially when the manager is publicly begging for more recruits.

You don’t do that when Andrew Cavenagh keeps promising a significant number of players still to arrive.

And you certainly don’t do it with a week of the window left and the squad still short in the positions that cost them a European campaign.

So what exactly was the plan?

Keep him, and hope somebody offers more in January, or next summer?

For a striker who had scored just 15 goals?

When putting that into context, just remember that Benjamin Nygren scored 21 goals last season.

Because let’s be honest here, clubs in that position take the money.

Every single time, clubs in that position take the money.

Unless, of course, there was never any money to take.

The story was never about Chermiti, it was about making the Ibrox side sound like a club that can afford to say no

That’s the whole point of it.

A club that turns down £22 million is a club with options.

A club with options is a big club, and a big club doesn’t need to explain the accounts to anybody.

It’s a lovely wee narrative, and the best thing about it is that it costs absolutely nothing to print.

No accounts have to balance for it to be true.

Nobody has to explain where the last twelve signings were funded from.

Then along comes the injury, and now the offer can never be tested.

How convenient.

Nobody has to produce the email, because the player who was supposedly worth it won’t kick a ball until the spring.

The bid gets to stay exactly what it always was – a number in somebody’s mouth.

And in six months’ time it will be repeated as fact, because that’s how this works up here.

Do I know for certain there was no offer?

No, and I’ll say that plainly.

Maybe Galatasaray did phone.

Maybe somebody at that end fancied a punt and got a polite no because the two clubs were miles apart on the money.

But there’s a fair distance between a speculative phone call and ‘they booted out £24 million’, and our media have sprinted the whole way across it without breaking stride.

As for McCoist being dismayed?

He’s dismayed because the fairy tale got a puncture, and he’s smart enough to know it.

That’s why he doesn’t want to talk about it.

Not the injury.

The offer.

Ask them for the paperwork.

They’ll not have any…

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