Today, fresh from yesterday’s very welcome news that Brendan Rodgers has met with representatives of the Celtic board for the second time, the club has released an odd and wholly un-necessary public statement, suggesting that they’ll “take their time” vetting a number of candidates until they arrive at “the right one.”
They’ll take their time? What the Hell have they been doing up until now?
What’s the purpose of that statement?
It denies that there is a “preferred candidate.”
Why bother even writing, far less releasing, patent nonsense like that?
The PR reeks like a week old corpse.
This is classic “load, aim and shoot yourself in the foot” stuff. The wave of giddy happiness many of us felt yesterday at the club showing ambition, and which, I’m sure, had a lot of folk filling in their renewal forms … how does the club think we feel right now?
That press release says “Prepare to be disappointed.”
It can be read no other way.
Whoever drafted it for release is a moron.
Let’s put it this way, it’s been weeks since the announcement was made about Ronny, and most sensible people knew way before that what was coming. I said at the start of this that the process would be swift if people had been doing their jobs right; there would be a list of “preferred candidates” in a drawer somewhere and the only task would be for the board to pick who the best one was and go out and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Are we really to believe the club has been dragging its feet all this time?
That we started from a blank page?
Who the Hell is running this railroad, and why am I not convinced that that will get us the top class name we deserve?
The last time Celtic conducted a “global search” for a boss we found him already in the manager’s office.
It was Neil Lennon, who apparently we arrived at after deciding there was no-one better out there.
A swift appointment returns stability to the situation. It gives the fans a chance to purchase season tickets knowing what they are getting with the money. Rodgers ticks every box, he answers every question, about ambition, commitment and intent.
He sells season tickets before he’s even managed a game.
Yesterday, the club announced that fans had just “two weeks left” to buy their season tickets for next year. Or what? They’re going to give them away to charity? If there are people hoping the appointment of some nonentity can be dragged out until after that “deadline” so as not to put folk off they better think again. Fans have only one weapon; keeping their hands in their pockets until they’re convinced by what’s in front of them.
Your season ticket will be there in a fortnight. It will be there in a month. And even if it’s not, do you think we’re going to fill Celtic Park every week next season unless the name coming at us is really Box Office, with the promise of a budget to spend? If you were so minded you could still attend every single game in the coming campaign; there will be tickets aplenty if this isn’t right on the nose. So I advise again that you wait and see.
The idea that there’s no “first choice” is just plain daft as well.
If there’s not a “first choice” then the whole club is being run on a “make it up as you go along” basis. In every decision of this sort there is a “preferred” option. Not all candidates are equal. Sometimes there’s a standout, a choice so clear you know it the second you hear his name. This is one of those occasions.
Someone inside Celtic Park thinks so. Rodgers has been spoken to twice, by the majority shareholder no less. He’s clearly interested or he wouldn’t bother doing the interviews. Personal terms, his freedom to operate as he sees fit, the budget he gets … these are what negotiations are for and I’m sure that if there wasn’t a middle ground to meet on that would have been cleared up at the first sit down, negating any need for a second.
Yet someone else inside Celtic Park appears highly resistant to this idea, and you have to look closely at what Lawwell said last week about this being a “decision by committee”, surely the worst possible way to make such a big decision.
Whatever happened to being decisive?
To having one man at the top who simply said “This guy’s the best, let’s pull out all the stops.”
If this is a “decision by committee” then all a right minded individual needs if he’s going to stick us with some cheap option are votes and a convincing manner. When he said “the Celtic board are all fans” last week I wanted to laugh, I really did. I know – for a fact – that there are non-Celtic fans on the board at Parkhead. For a fact. There’s no purpose to a statement like that when the truth is actually in the public domain and has been for years.
Am I suggesting someone would deliberately push for a lesser candidate to screw us? Of course not. These are intelligent adults, not mumbling fleggers on a street corner. I’m suggesting that they will not approach this from an emotional standpoint like you or I would, and would be quite happy with someone cheap and easily controlled because that helps with the “bottom line.” They don’t necessarily care about what’s “best for the club”, only what’s best for the balance sheet and we need to remember that. I’m ever mindful of the fact when I read, for example, that the chairman has, in a public forum, in front of the press, called Celtic fans racists.
It’s clear that there’s a battle going on inside the club. Yesterday someone leaked the Rodgers talks to the media with the emphasis on the “preferred candidate” part. That person was getting the word out that he has big plans and big ideas.
Today one of the “pragmatists” has released a statement with the club’s name on it, and so the natural consequence is that we’re to infer that this is the faction whose view is likely to prevail. But they’ve reckoned without the guys who still have their money in their pockets.
A Peter Houston type appointment isn’t going to wash here. The fans have been force fed this stuff about our club having ambitions beyond these shores for years now, only to be pushed slowly towards accepting utter mediocrity. If this appointment is another step on that road the backlash will be enormous.
There’s not long left.
They can’t drag this out for much longer.
If Rodgers wants the job and Dermot Desmond or whoever goes into the boardroom with a recommendation that we hire him we have to make sure that this proposal has as much support as we can give it, so that the decision around that table becomes one of whether the club takes a risk on the new boss or an even bigger one with the season books.
There’s a reason the fans are never asked for their “preferred option.”
A lot of people still think this is a discussion best had without our input.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
They’re not going to get to shut us out of it.