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Celtic’s Transfer Window Shuts Leaving Fans And The Manager Short Changed

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This is what we get for having faith, I guess.

So the transfer window closes with a soft thud.

Not nearly good enough.

The midfielder we all expected – and had good cause to expect – hasn’t been delivered.

This morning I said we’d been victims of bad luck, and we have been, but that’s not the whole story. We’ve also been victims of foot dragging and general incompetence inside Celtic Park, not to mention a colossal lack of vision.

I’m not interested in spin over this, nor the assertion that the manager is “pleased” with the business. He’s in control of transfer targeting now – as was evidenced by the signing of his keeper and his right back when he’d identified those areas as crucial to the team – but he doesn’t do the negotiating and can’t be blamed for those who fail to deliver there.

The player he wanted above all, the marquee signing that would have convinced us all that others inside the club take this stuff seriously, hasn’t been forthcoming and that’s pretty abysmal. From the day he arrived that was clearly – very clearly – a priority.

As it turns out, we’ve spent very little in this window, in spite of 50,000 season tickets, sold largely on the basis that the manager would be backed in the transfer market. I am happy with the signings that have been made, but we dragged our feet and although the manager wanted a central midfielder for months we’ve not got one.

The Champions League pot of gold, which is already as good as in the bank, hasn’t been touched.

Since the draw was made we’ve signed Cristian Gamboa; that’s the sole signing that’s supposed to prepare the club for the toughest Group stage draw we’ve ever had. If I wasn’t asking serious, searching, questions about that I wouldn’t be doing my job.

The money that’s on offer for getting points in the Groups wasn’t even considered worth going for and instead we’re already hearing that the manager is satisfied, that he’s been fully supported and that this was all about bad luck.

I wrote this morning that we have had bad luck, and there’s no doubt that drawing City in the Champions League was exactly that. Something went wrong with the proposed McCarthy deal; in the end we’re not even one of the clubs allegedly trying to get him on loan. Who the Hell knows what that’s all about, but the player spent much of the last month telling people he had his heart set on coming to Glasgow and expected to do just that.

As I said this morning, in these matters you make your own luck.

The unofficial version of events is that we had one deal we were working on and it didn’t come off. With three hours of the transfer window left that’s that. There’s no Plan B, no trying for someone else. Just Lawwell turning out the lights and going home to his heated driveway, paid for out of the supporter’s hard earned cash. Hard luck stories are all we ever hear from some people at Parkhead and in this case we’re supposed to accept this because “hey, at least we tried.”

It was ever thus.

I’ve got news for the CEO and others inside Celtic Park; failure is failure, whether it’s the manager who doesn’t cut it or someone else. Managers pay with their jobs. If you’ve got the right contract at Celtic Park you can actually benefit from making sure he gets as little money as possible. Success will not belong outside the boss’s office … but others at our club will coin it in as a consequence of what he achieves. Those days ought to be nearing their end.

When the club posts its profits for the year 2016-17 we will remember tonight. When the grinning CEO goes in front of the press and claims to have made sure the manager has what he needs I’m going to make sure this site publishes the full details of his own recompense, so we can see what those profits put in his pocket. Depriving the playing squad so that others at the club can look like great businessmen … it impresses few people in the stands and gets harder to stomach every single year.

This year it’s especially shocking, with such a fine manager in the dugout.

We’re on the cusp of an outstanding season on the pitch, at least domestically. We have a brilliant, inspirational new boss who has motived people in the dressing room to better form than I thought they were capable of. He has an eye for a good player.

Others at the club are so scandalously lax, lazy or just outright opposed to the direction Brendan wants to take us that they’ve succeeded in wiping out the goodwill that last week should have inspired towards everybody at Celtic Park.

Many of us have never flinched on our desire to see certain people gone from Parkhead. That remains a pressing need, because they are out of ideas and out of things to offer. They’ve become stale and are now an active obstacle to forward progress.

I am sorry to be writing this tonight; we should have been celebrating the confirmation of a new era at the club, the Brendan Rodgers era. Because that’s what this is; he’s the leader we are all looking to, he is far and away the most important person at Celtic.

Others better get used to that, fast, and any illusions they have of winning a popularity contest had better be laid aside just as quickly.

One man commands the absolute loyalty of the fans here, and to let him down …

No wonder they’re spinning how “delighted” he is with their utter failure today.

One of the most obvious conclusions you can draw from the last few weeks is that Brendan has learned quickly who he can rely on in the dressing room.

He’s fast learning who he can rely on outside of it too.

In Brendan We Trust.

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