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Has Overmighty Lawwell Been Cut Down To Size?

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Sometimes, amidst the ruins of something, you see a glimpse of a better future and there are times when the seeds of it are scattered by an explosion.

On Fields, I wrote an article last month called The Storm Before The Calm, in which I said that I believed the club as going to go through one huge period of turmoil to emerge much better on the other side.

Earlier this week, none of us could see much to be happy about when Peter Lawwell gave an absolutely horrendous interview to The Sun. It was the medium as much as the message itself which crystalised the thinking of many people. They could not believe he’d done something so crass; even his most prominent supporters ran for cover or disavowed him.

He claims not to pay attention to social media; that’s what they all say these days, of course, as if it were comprised of a bunch of kooks and cranks. Which perhaps explains why so many bloggers have had the tea and biscuits treatment at Celtic Park these last couple of years. Cause no-one reads us and the club doesn’t respond to us.

He said he does get feedback on what we’re saying … and whatever the truth of it, that feedback will have been absolutely horrendous these last few days.

“He gave an interview to who?” one prominent online guy asked me this week, having just got my email about it. He’s someone who’s usual very loyal to the club.

He then unleashed a string of expletives I won’t write on here.

I think that  interview was a turning point, and in retrospect I even understand what it was a little better than I did a few days ago. Amidst his protestations that he was misunderstood and his penchant for self-worship I detected a little desperation. For the first time this was a guy talking about his exit. This was a guy defending what he’d built and I wasn’t the only one who thought he was doing so for the last time.

Today, an exercise in serious damage limitation: Lawwell has spoken to a couple of other papers in an effort to deflect criticism from The Sun one, and he’s been more expansive in his answers. It’s as if someone inside Celtic Park has got a grip of him and told him it’s time to start building bridges.

He’s not completely done so; whilst claiming to respect the views of all the fans he’s split us into two separate camps – the sensible ones and those he wants to taint as being a little out there; I don’t feel particularly bad about being categorised in the latter group, not at all – but overall, he’s been more conciliatory than I’ve read in ages.

A lot of what he says today I can simply dismiss as the usual PR fluff. He still expects us to find some virtue in the way we’ve sold our best players for big money in recent years. He doesn’t appear to grasp that this is one of the reasons for the empty seats, that we’re not building a team we’re simply plugging holes year in year out. But that aside, I did read things I liked.

He’s stepped back from the notion of picking the backroom team. That’s a plus.

He said Ronny was the exception rather than the rule – although he never clarifies why that was done in the first place – but he also admits that Ronny was pegged for a place at Celtic Park anyway and would have been similarly imposed on someone. At the same time, he denies having any role in picking which players the manager signs, saying he’s not qualified to make that judgement – something every single fan would agree with.

He is disingenuous here, of course, but he’s more revealing than he knows.

Let’s be clear; this is one of the frequent distortions some of us have to deal with, this idea that we’ve somehow accused Lawwell of “picking the players” the manager signs. Go back and double check that again; I’ve never, in all these blogs, written those words or anything like them.

There are very few bloggers who ever have.

Like the “spend spend spend” lie – which I discussed this week when I said what most of us want is a moderate investment in the playing squad that moves us up another level without risking the financial integrity of the club – this one is used to beat us relentlessly.

I have a clear idea as to how things work at Celtic, a clearer idea than Lawwell appears to believe. I’m 100% sure the manager makes the final decision on most of the signings (you see I didn’t say all there? Look, Deila didn’t sign Craig Gordon. That’s a simple fact) but the process by which players are identified and shortlisted for him is controlled elsewhere, by John Park, and it’s overseen by Lawwell himself.

He can claim not to be a Director of Football all he wants … but in many ways that’s exactly the role he’s been playing these last few years.

So does he actually make the signings? Of course not.

Because he isn’t qualified for that. Yet he wasn’t qualified to choose Ronny Deila’s assistant manager for him either, and he had no problem at all trying to do it.

What I am sure he does do is set a very strict criteria for John Park, and that filters out the choices the manager is presented with, and to many of us that amounts to exactly the same thing as if he and Park were playing Football Manager with our club.

(Park’s a guy many Celtic would dearly love to see gone, I suspect. His own failures have been many, and costly; why is this guy the only senior person at a top club in charge of scouting who doesn’t know the number one criteria when picking a striker is “does he score goals?” If Lawwell’s own failures should be costing him his job, what’s the justification for leaving this guy in his role a second longer? None that I can see. None at all.)

Today Lawwell’s said something unequivocal; the manager who’s coming in will have “100% control” over transfers. That’s pretty broad, and as that’s in the public domain I would fully expect any manager who’s being met with to insist that Word be made Law; in other words, that will go into a contract, and be iron clad and irrevocable.

He trips himself up a couple of times over the course, such as when he says there was a feeling after the European campaign ended that Ronny might not be doing so well – but the board allowed him to stay in the job anyway, arguably costing us two trophies, and at the same time not bothering to put together a shortlist until the closing weeks of the season – but overall he sounded, to me, like a guy who realises there’s a certain amount of writing on the wall.

The Lawwell Project –for The Strategy is his own, dear friends, and he needs to man up about it and own that – is almost at an end. Tellingly, he refused to discuss his own long term future at the club, realising, it seems to me, that he no longer has one.

The interview’s most important part was the acknowledgement that the hunt for a new manager has been taken out of his hands and is being conducted elsewhere. Does he use those words? No, he doesn’t, but a lifetime of studying politicians talk has taught me to read between the lines.

He describes himself, at one point, as “the hired hand” – something I’ve never heard him say before; the words of a man well and truly cut down to size of late, however you dress it up – and says a “committee” will scrutinise the next managerial appointment where “everyone will have an input.”

And where some, presumably, will be more equal than others.

Of course, all this might be an attempt to deflect, so that another low-calibre appointment isn’t blamed on him, but in truth I can’t accept for a second that our majority shareholder doesn’t see his CEO as a busted flush and his strategy as being dangerous to the future of the club.

The really important stuff is going to be put back where it belongs; in the hands of the manager and his people. I suspect there’ll even be a transfer budget we can all get behind, and I think the signings we’ll see this summer might just tick some of those boxes we want to see filled. Expect at least one striker who knows where the net is for openers; no more “projects” on that front.

Peter Lawwell has had his wings clipped. Pick the euphemism you want. What we all saw as a bombastic, arrogant interview earlier this week was, in fact, the opposite. It was an attempt to front it up and look to the world as if he is still in charge. And on the face of it he will be, but this is very much the beginning of the end. He’s being transitioned out the door. He’ll be given the privilege of dignity and respect – he’s due both for the positives he has brought to the club; I was once a huge fan, don’t forget – but I reckon his taxi’s en route.

I think next season is his last.

He’ll get to play the big shot one last time, and take his bow to leave the stage with a happier club left behind him because of decisions taken elsewhere.

Giving up control, voluntarily or otherwise, will allow him to depart to applause.

You know what? I don’t hate the man, and never have. I simply don’t think he’s doing us any good and if it were my choice he’d be gone as CEO by close of business today … but if he were simply moved aside and out of the front line, told to keep his head down and his nose out of areas which don’t concern him, I’d be happy for him to stay at Celtic Park as long as he liked.

Whatever happens now, we are seeing the first major structural changes at Celtic Park in years, and it’s not before time. I’m still recommending that anyone who’s not bought a season ticket hold off a while longer, to make sure we don’t end up with Mark McGhee in the dugout, but earlier in the week I thought we’d been sent a definitive “screw you” from this guy; today I see someone blowing smoke to cover a retreat.

A change is gonna come.

And I think we’ll be better for it.

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