One of the common threads that runs through media coverage of the latest Sevco crisis is this notion that their in-house mistakes, their own stupidity, has made Celtic’s life easy these past few years. That is an offensive suggestion, one that insults not only our club but every other club in the top flight. But still, it’s there, and it’s blatant.
Matthew Lindsay is the latest hack to boldly say it, in his article entitled “Rangers’ act of folly has gift-wrapped 10-in-a-row for Celtic.” In this piece he makes a number of assertions that one could only make if you didn’t care for facts or perhaps just didn’t want to give the slightest praise to our club. Nobody has “gift wrapped” anything; for us to get to ten in a row we need to keep winning games. Year on year on year. Against everyone.
Nobody at Celtic Park is taking that for granted. To get there will require an enormous effort on the part of everyone at the club. To read nonsense like this in a so-called quality newspaper makes you despair for what you’ll find in the tabloids should you dip a toe into their sewage.
Lindsay doesn’t stop there either; he suggests that Sevco were the better side for much of the game when the club came to Celtic Park and snatched a 1-1 draw late in the day last season. Uhuh. Talk about setting yourself up for a fall. Of all the curiosities that have been thrown up by the Caixinha sacking, the idea of Graeme Murty returning to Celtic Park at the end of this year to see if he can repeat the feat … that’s the most tantalising.
Because a lot of outright fiction is being written about that game; it allegedly proves that good organisation is all Sevco need, instead of good players. They did no more than Hibs and St Johnstone have done this season, but nobody talks about them having made some kind of football breakthrough. If Murty was still there for the coming visit, that would certainly erase once and for all this bizarre belief some have that he found a “stop Celtic” solution.
Murty’s got a result because we weren’t clinical enough. There was nothing more glamourous about it than that. We failed to finish them off, that’s it. He’s very lucky we’re probably not going to get the chance to settle that one.
The article really takes a high dive into surrealism when it suggested that the financial situation at Ibrox is “steadily improving.” At this point in the piece I really did start to wonder if I was being trolled; this is a club that is hiding its accounts from public scrutiny as if there’s evidence of a fraud in there. And who knows? Maybe there is.
I think when you view the article in its entirety, you see that it doesn’t hold up. It is weak and the central thesis of it is arrogant, offensive rubbish. Celtic’s march to ten in a row, if it succeeds, will have been built on solid foundations, and on three managers constructing piece by piece a football machine which was better than any other in the league.
Lenny, Ronny and Brendan will deserve all the credit, along with the people at the club who supported them and laid the infrastructure for the successes. The players will deserve it for pushing themselves and staying focussed and concentrating on the job at hand, no matter how much howling anarchy is going on elsewhere in the game.
In short, our success is down to us. Nobody else. And as we move forward it will be for someone to stop us. Nobody will hand us anything on a plate. As long as we keep winning, we frankly don’t care what scrabbling for second place looks like.