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As We Head Into The Weekend, Is Everything Really Quiet On The Transfer Market Front?

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Weekends are usually football’s business days, but we’re in that bizarre limbo right now between the stuff that’s going on and the stuff that’s still to come.

These are the days fans climb the walls because the competitive stuff has started but the games aren’t coming on the schedule we all know and love.

That’s still a couple of weeks away.

Stuck here in this bizarre borderland, the fans long for any little titbit of information that gives us a sign of where we’re going as a club.

Right now, after a period of activity when the club looked like it would spend megabucks and Lennon would rebuild the team, we’ve fallen into Celtic’s typical transfer window inertia. Another signing deadline has come and gone.

Not that it matters in some ways; we still have time to add “wild-card” players to the pool, and I expect that in the case of Hatem Abd Elhamed I expect that we will. But there’s a lot less business done here than I expected, with Lennon having confidently predicted two signings by the time the next round of Europe kicks off.

We hope the second isn’t Simpson.

The signing of Abd Elhamed will restore us to parity at central defence.

We are stronger on the left side but still have nobody on the right. The midfield is what it was; we tried for Turnbull but didn’t sign him and so far it’s only Connell we’ve added and we have no idea what kind of player we’ve got there just yet. Jullien and Bolingoli look solid … but it’s not nearly enough.

We need more.

We lost a hell of a lot of footballers during the summer – most of them, I will grant you, nothing more than squad filler – and we’ve not even started to replace them properly. We need to replace some of them because we need backups for every position.

Lennon actually talks about reducing the squad size further; I worry about that at a time when we’re facing a 60 game campaign for the umpteenth year in a row.

I sincerely hope he – and the board – know what they are doing here and whilst I’m sure that they do it would be good to see some sign of it beyond what we read in the papers.

Just once more in this window I’d love to see this club shock us like they did when we paid the big money for Jullien, the signing that was rightly identified as the game-changer.

Another signing like that, to keep the momentum going and to show we really do mean business … that would be perfect. And it is necessary.

A lot of online chatter suggests that the club is working on just such a signing … that there are things happening behind the silence.

It’s also worth noting that we have, and are, holding firm on any offers for our best players … everyone has a price, but nobody is going on the cheap.

People at Parkhead are busy working on stuff … it would be good if we could get some of it done.

The sooner the better.

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