Treble Dream Died Because We Have No Plan B

The moment Efe Ambrose went off, I knew it was over.

The score was still 1-0 Celtic. Ross County had not yet converted their penalty to make it 1-1, but I knew it was going to be one of those days. Every fear I’ve had about this team, going back months, was going to be realised and I could see it all unfold.

I take no satisfaction from it. On the contrary.

We’ve all seen teams win games with ten men. It happens often. When you have better players, losing one of them doesn’t necessarily provoke high anxiety unless it’s the keeper who’s gone and you’ve no reserve goalie on the bench.

But that depends on what happens next.

If your team is in the lead you can afford to take a striker off. As most teams play with more than one of those you can do it without necessarily making your team notably weaker. If you’re chasing a game it’s harder to justify, but if you’re playing four at the back you can go to a three, which retains your attacking options albeit you sacrifice your full-backs.

If you have four in midfield you can sacrifice one of those, which often means giving away width and trying to play the game through the middle.

There are options. There are always options.

And with the right tactical set-up all things are possible.

We were never going to get the right response, and I knew that.

The need for a Plan B was acute, but we don’t have one of those.

When something goes wrong with Plan A we pay the price.

Today it’s a high price.

Ultimately we got what we deserved.

Weeks ago, when I started asking questions about our manager, a lot of people were of the opinion that myself and others had been too hard on him because we were “still on course for the treble.” We no longer are, and I said at the time we wouldn’t win it because the level of consistency required for that is beyond us.

I don’t think we’ll win the Scottish Cup either.

There’s a certain inevitability about the next “bad day at the office.”

On a mental level, this team is appallingly weak and that weakness goes up throughout the club; to the manager’s office, to the CEO’s, to the boardroom, to the chairman himself.

Until something major changes we’ll remain this way.

Watching Leigh Griffiths today was especially painful, and his penalty miss was awful to witness.

He toiled, as anyone will when he’s being marked 4-1 and the manager has made a decision which lends him absolutely no support. Any one of us could have formulated a tactical plan to achieve that objective knowing how we line up.

The questions will mount up now.

But I’ve got no faith in any answer being provided by the club itself.

I said Ronny had to nail it in this transfer window, and one signing and one on loan – a kid, at that, us developing another team’s player – isn’t good enough and not even close. We’re already hearing the expected nonsense about how hard it is to find players in January … but no harder than it’ll be to bring some in with Europe looming.

The prospect of European qualifiers fills me with dread today.

We’ll still win the title. Probably. For a lot of people that’s going to be enough and as long as they are in the majority and are willing to be “faithful through and through” the board has no incentive to change direction. This club will continue to stagnate.

There’s not much more to say at the moment.

I wanted to be writing a different article this evening, but from the second I saw Craig Thomson pull out the red card I knew it would be like this.

That’s somehow even more depressing than the result itself.

It was all so predictable.