According to CQN this afternoon, the leaked letter which appeared in The Times of London yesterday didn’t come from Celtic after all.
Paul67 hasn’t explicitly blamed the SFA for that leak, but the implication is obvious.
I can’t believe they would be so stupid … or rather, I can easily believe it but still have difficulty fully wrapping my brain around it.
Paul67 says it’s an effort to spin this whole affair, the idea of an investigation, as “Peter Lawwell’s obsession.”
I actually laughed reading that; no harm to Paul67 for his typically sterling work.
No I laughed because it’s clear the SFA is still not getting its money’s worth from its PR people.
If this is all they’ve got they don’t have much.
It’s a self-defeating strategy for two reasons, but the most obvious of which is that I know for a fact a lot of people already do think this is a Celtic-Sevco-Rangers issue and they can’t be convinced otherwise.
Is there any mileage in so blatantly playing to a gallery of ignorant people?
If this is really the SFA’s PR plan I hope they kept the receipt.
The other reason this is self-defeating is that it will have mightily pissed Celtic off, and the only hope the SFA had here is that Celtic could be diverted from this course. They just assured we’ll be sticking to it, all the way to the finish … not that it was ever in doubt, but still.
Poking a lion with a stick through the bars is one thing … running up behind it and grabbing it by the tail is surely an act of rank insanity, no matter how good you think you are.
And I’ve got news for these people; you ain’t good.
You are awful at this stuff.
You’ve left enough holes in the barricades that you could drive a tank through them.
Celtic won’t take this lying down.
I said last night that Regan and the SFA had declared war on our club; they did, but a lot sooner than I was aware. The reaction inside Celtic Park is said to be incandescent over this … the mood has darkened significantly, and the fallout is going to be severe.
This has reached a point of no return.
There’s no sorting this out with a chat and some vague promises of reform somewhere down the line.
The parties couldn’t be further apart on how this thing should be handled, and with the SFA so publicly attempting to embarrass us with this “it’s only Celtic who care” strategy, they’ve actually removed one of the things that has, up until now, held us back from pushing this as hard as we might have.
See, Celtic has ever been conscious of how our actions would be perceived.
It’s why we’ve tried to build coalitions, and worked with other clubs on these matters.
The club has ever been concerned that the governing bodies and others might try to paint our pressure for an inquiry in just such a manner … but the club also knew that it would have to be dealt with at some point, and that we would need to “go public.”
Well we are a lot closer to that day than we were yesterday, and it’s the SFA who have changed the timeframe, and not in their favour.
Everyone now knows Celtic have been pushing this behind the scenes; it’s public now, and secrecy only avails you until you can no longer use it. With secrecy no longer possible, it forces us into the open. But it also liberates us from any further need to tread lightly.
Someone at the SFA told Regan this would constitute a win; I mean, seriously … who is advising these people?
In poker, forcing someone to show their hand can be costly, and you usually only do it when you think they’re bluffing.
Celtic isn’t bluffing though, and we’re not holding a pair of twos here.
We’ve had five years and huge resources to work with … if they believe our wish to do things via the proper channels was about weakness they’ve sorely underestimated us or overestimated their own position. It doesn’t really matter which it is.
The SFA has taken the pin out of the grenade and thrown the pin out the window.
The trouble is, the grenade is glued to Regan’s own desk.
They’ve deliberately provoked Celtic, used a private communication to try to embarrass us, stiffed the other clubs and tried to bounce them, attempted a crude bribe which has involved more backtracking than a Theresa May press briefing and even dragged UEFA into their scam.
It’s hard to conceive of a strategy more self-destructive.
Yet I’m just betting that this time yesterday, Broadfoot and Regan were congratulating themselves on a job well done.
These people are living on another planet …
And whilst I’m on the subject of Broadfoot, I wonder how the SFA’s other clubs feel about the association’s CEO using their membership fees to pay an ex-employee and his PR company to handle spin control by attacking one of their own through the media, to divert from a scandal and keep the wolves from the door?
If that’s not misappropriation of funds I don’t know what is.
This isn’t going away, but it is going to get more vicious, and again, if these people think knuckle balls in the dirt are going to save them they better guess again; RTC is primed and ready to drop information napalm on them if they dare and he’s not the only one.
In a mud-fight, are these people, the people with the most dirt under their fingernails, really expecting to win?
Good God, are they wired to the moon?
They have to be.
Only the utmost restraint has stopped our club from going nuclear thus far.
That restraint was a product of our calculation about this being painted as being about “title stripping” and “Rangers”, a genuine desire to let people do the right thing and having no sincere wish to drag this to the limit if that could be at all avoided; yesterday Regan and his PR pals just obliterated our ability to control perception, wrecked any hope there was that people would act with integrity and made sure that any lingering chance that this could be resolved with other than a major showdown is gone.
I have no idea if our finger is on the trigger right now … but I’d bet my every penny that as of yesterday afternoon the safety is well and truly off.