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Sevco Fans Just Never Learn. A 35 Year Old Signing And They’re “Going For 55” Again.

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When do the Peepul learn?

When do the humiliations get so severe that they wise up?

That they stop making complete fools of themselves with big talk and big predictions? They’ve signed a defender in his mid thirties, for a “nominal fee” in spite of his having one year to go on his two year deal. And they gave him an extra year on top of it.

Is he a good player? Probably. Will he add something to their defence? Probably, considering how poor the current state of it is. But he’ll be no more effective than Clint Hill, himself a member of the Over 35’s club. And how can I predict that with such confidence? Easy.

Because last season we brought in a 35 year old defender, as a squad player, and he made 14 appearances in total. He, too, had all the experience in the world, including winning honours and international competitions. He was a member of the Arsenal “Invincibles” as well.

This signing is a good one. For them. If we’d signed him I would be wondering why. But at their level they take what they can get. He will improve their team, but instead of celebrating that, and being content to see what else the manager conjured up, the Sevco supporters are acting like this is a game changer. It’s not. They’ve signed a guy in the twilight of his career who most of them have never seen kick a ball in anger, but he has a “name.”

Not like Kolo Toure, but a familiar one.

The attraction of a “name” is obvious, but I have news for them; they aren’t the first club to try this. They aren’t the first club seduced by signing a footballer who’s known outside of his homeland. Apart from Toure – who did a functional job for us but quickly fell out of the running to be a regular first team player – we can look back over a history of this; a handful, like Robbie Keane and Bellamy, were success stories.

But normally these players have a habit of dying on their arse. Aside from their own obvious, catastrophic, mistakes of last season, there’s Ljundberg, Graveson, Juninho, Wright, Dublin, Carlton Cole, Colin Kazim-Richards … and every one of them a waste of a jersey.

At the end of the day, this is still a Pedro Caixinha team and your legs don’t get stronger as you get older.

And we just finished a season unbeaten in Scotland.

Unless Alves is a 30 goal a season striker or a  top class ball winning midfielder or a pacy winger – and he’s none of those, of course – he’s not going to help them where they need it most.

And his signing doesn’t change the most fundamental fact of all; that Celtic is a football juggernaut that is going to take some stopping if we’re to lose as much as a game.  As long as we keep winning there really isn’t a lot Alves or anyone else at Ibrox can do.

Aberdeen fans know this. They know their own side has to be pretty near perfect even to close the gap. They don’t think ridiculous thoughts about challenging us and they were all that stood between us and a treble last year. They got to both finals. They were second in the league.

Yet Sevco fans are delirious about this, as though they’d signed a promising young top talent instead of a guy who probably views Scottish football as a holiday destination where he can wind down his career. Hey, he wouldn’t be the first to do that.

But Barton was a competitive player, who played a lot of games in a competitive league, the year before they signed him. And he was miles off the pace. Miles. And I’m willing to bet the same idiots in the media who took him to be player of the year last season pick Alves to be the star of the next one. They never learn either.

But the Peepul are the dumbest of them all. They are, again “going for 55” as if the capture of a guy who’s club allowed him to walk away virtually for free was going to turn their rag-bag squad into something capable of posing a threat to us.

How arrogant to simply assume that the rest of Scottish football can be dismissed, that Celtic itself will stand still and let them catch up. If we did stand still that would still be enough to hold the “challenge from Ibrox” at bay … but of course we’ve no intention of doing that at all.

But hey, at least those “going for 55” t-shirts and flags didn’t go to waste.

And if they treat them with care they’ll be good for another eight or nine seasons to come.

By that time, of course, we’ll have got there ahead of them.

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