I remember my teenage years, and a whole lot of pain.
I remember my early twenties, and a whole lot more of it.
There were times when it seemed it would never end. When it did, in 1998, and we won only the third league title I could ever actually remember, I thought it might be ushering in a different, a better, era. But then came Advocaat.
1998-99 was a red-letter season for most Celtic fans.
The turmoil of the 80’s and 90’s had been forgotten about but there was Murray, that arrogant arsehole, possessed of an almost mind-bending obsession with one-upping us, going out and bringing in a top class continental coach and showering him with the kind of wealth that made even English teams balk.
He spent £36 million on players in his first season.
Think on that for a minute. Consider where we play football. Consider what that would be worth today, 20 years later, and then try and re-imagine a Scottish club spending it. Even in today’s heightened market it would be ludicrous. Back then it was utterly, utterly unbelievable.
We were never supposed to compete with that. How could we? We didn’t have that kind of money just lying around. We couldn’t imagine how they did. Some of us, even then, could smell that the fix was in, but before the internet, before citizen journalists could do the right kind of digging and present it to an audience, we had to eat it.
Securing Martin O’Neill looked like a turning point, and in some ways it was. It pushed Murray to the most reckless period of his time in charge, a period characterised by the madness of paying £12 million for Tore Andre Flo, which remains the summit of his arrogance and hubris as he tried to one-up our earlier signing of Chris Sutton. It was his keeping his egotistical promise to himself and their fans that for every £1 we spent, he would spend £2.
And as long as someone else was paying for it, he could.
Yesterday, the news broke that we were about to bring in our first signing of the January window, and I marvelled at it. The player in question is a 19 year old Ivorian midfielder who plays in Russia; by no stretch of the imagination is this not a risky signing.
I trust the manager and his people, so it’s not a huge risk, but this is a lot of money for a punt.
But we have the money. We’re not dependent on the largesse of banks or sugar daddy owners. We have legitimate men of means on the board, one of them a guy with the wealth to buy Murray and King ten times over. But these people don’t bankroll Celtic. They provide expertise but do not make us their personal playthings. If they were gone tomorrow we might miss their gravitas but we would not miss their money. That’s never been an issue.
As I said yesterday, this is a message as much as a signing. We’re purchasing a kid and he’s costing more than the budgets of every other SPL club combined. This isn’t Murray’s club spending £37 million in a single season; that was madness. This is calculated, but affordable, and although I have no doubt that we want this guy and that there are other clubs interested – which demand that it be done within a certain timeframe – we could have waited a few weeks.
But we did this deal even as the glow of Ibrox was wearing off, in the same week their own star signing – I’d say “stop laughing”, but I haven’t yet – faces a three month lay-off after they left him sitting in an Accident & Emergency ward for hours.
They could barely afford him; they certainly couldn’t afford for him to be a failure, and you can already see that he is. We’re doing this deal even as they scramble around trying to find free transfers or some EPL loanee.
They look desperate, whilst we look like a club with real muscle, and that is most definitely calculated; someone inside Celtic Park definitely took this shot with that foremost in their mind. The contrast is too clear not to be deliberate.
This is the Revenge of Celtic.
This is the revenge of my generation of Celtic supporters, kicking those of Sevco whilst they are down. It’s a reminder that what happened in 2012 was the direct result of all the spending that came before, and a re-assertion of all that’s been said since; that whether you buy into the Survival Lie or not, that everything’s changed. The club that spent all that money died, for sure. In terms of the so-called rivalry it’s over.
We did this one because we could, and in part because they can’t. We timed it to perfection. We wanted it to hurt, to pile pain on top of pain. In a way it’s petty, snide, a wee bit cruel even. But I like it that way and sympathy is impossible to sustain when one remembers Gabriel Amato being “flown in on the private jet” at a time when they’d already signed two Dutch internationals. They went on to buy Andre Kanchelskis the same month.
Every one was timed for maximum humiliation. We didn’t spend a penny in that close season, only getting the cheque book out in September of that year for Vidar Riseth and then, a month later, for a 33 year old called Lubo Moravcik.
Transformational events were right around the corner, but even they weren’t complete. Martin never got to three in a row. Gordon never made it to four. McLeish, Le Guen and Smith came and went and there were more years of pain … and then silence, followed by laughter.
Followed by laughter.
Followed by. Followed by.
And we’re still laughing.
Today we’re spending £2.5 million on a punt. Do they even have £2.5 million left of the season ticket money? If their world depended on writing that cheque, right now, would they be able to find it? Or would they circle the drain like Rangers and swirl down the plughole?
Get used to it, to our foot on their throat. Get to like it even, because this is the future, for as far as we can see it. Because this is sustainable. They talk about ten in a row as if it’s the worst that can happen, as if we’ll stop there.
I have news for them … we won’t stop even after we pass their magical number 55, as if that was achievable from beyond the grave.
It’s achievable for us.
It’s all in our sights now, and all the suffering they can handle.