Lee McCulloch is mouthing off in the press today, sending a very unflattering message to the players at Ibrox. I reckon he’s making a bid for a job over there when Murty is sacked, but that’s by-the-by. His intent isn’t what interests me, only his words. He said that if he was at Ibrox there would have been no question of people in the dressing room conceding the title.
This is only partly because McCulloch, like others, labours under the massive delusion that Sevco is still some sort of super-club, one that is capable of challenging us. It is nonsense, of course; this is a team locked in a dogfight for fourth spot right now.
The idea that they should be trading blows with us at the top of the table is patently ridiculous.
But in some ways I understand where the idea comes from, beyond the sheer arrogance of it. There is a certain undeniable logic behind it. The idea comes from us.
They look at Celtic Park and they see a team that is not on form, a team that hasn’t been on form since this domestic campaign kicked off. A team that has failed to win fully one third of their matches and has played as though wading through mud.
They see that team and they know this could have been the year, and if not for them then for a team like Aberdeen, who must be kicking themselves that they endured the horrendous McInnes to Ibrox phase. Sevco, inadvertently, in their own greed and desire to upset the Pittodrie operation and stall that second spot bandwagon, actually helped to derail the one club that posed a serious threat to stopping seven – and thereby ten – in a row.
The second best squad in the league is the one at Pittodrie. A better manager than McInnes, one capable of taking his team to Ibrox and Celtic Park, a manager who doesn’t blow it on every big occasion, would have had them right up our backsides this year and we would only have ourselves to blame for it. We’ve become complacent and lax.
There are six games to go in the league and two in the cup. Our dismal form this season means that we’ve never won four league games on the bounce; by my reckoning there’s at least one more draw or a loss in that six game league spell. Our form in the cups has been excellent, though, but frankly the league form gives you no reason to believe that will stay the case. We are vulnerable to bad days at the office, and in a later piece I’ll write (again) about why.
But ponder this for a moment; we went to Ibrox with the media talking big about a title challenge from that quarter. Had it not all been talk, had they really turned some sort of corner and into a team that was even half as good as they think they are, and they’d got a result that day … we’ve dropped points in two out of three games since then. The title challenge would have been real, because we’d have made it real.
People need to stop kidding themselves about how bad that is. We gave them a chink of light in the first place with two draws and a defeat in December and the Kilmarnock defeat and the draw at home to St Johnstone after the winter break. At no point in this league season have we had the power of momentum propelling us forward.
And other teams know it. Like sharks, circling, they know there’s blood in the water. This isn’t the same Celtic as dominated everyone in the last campaign and stories of dressing room issues and players whose heads are elsewhere are intriguing but they don’t come close to actually getting a handle on what the real problem here seems, to me, to be.
We are predictable. We are easy to shut down. Neil McCann had the easiest job to do of any manager in Britain here, and in hindsight we should have seen it. He knew our team formation, even if not the line-up. And once you know how a team intends to set up you know exactly what you need to do to stop them. Motherwell managed it with ten men.
I’ll go into the tactical side of it in more detail later. This is the morning after, yet again, a feeling of frustration that has become all too familiar this season. It’s like lessons just aren’t being learned. Last years was so many giant strides forward that there were always going to be some backward steps this season; no-one expected perfection.
But no-one expected this either; on this form, Ronny Deila was fired, and after a semi-final against Sevco at Hampden.
Brendan won’t be fired, and before the hysterics start getting their knickers in a knot nobody is saying he should be, but is another Hampden horror show really what it’s going to take before some people at our club get a grip on this?
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