As with every major Ibrox announcement, the reaction from the media has been ridiculously predictable.
Giddy glee and a slab of transfer war chest nonsense to whet the appetites of the stupidest football fans in the world.
And threaded through some of the reporting already, a burning question; how should Celtic respond?
And the answer is surely obvious; by doing what we’ve been doing all along.
In the end, why should we do otherwise? Hey, if Sevco wants to imperil its very future on a barmy gamble that’s entirely their own lookout. If they find some mug willing to “give” them money – there will be more catches than Sig Hansen has managed in his whole career – that’s the mug’s lookout.
To catch us it will take more than a few Green Shield Stamps.
We’re doing fine, just fine, following our own plan. You only need to look at the papers to see that Sevco’s obsession is with bling and looking like a big club. We are the ones actually growing ours, investing in infrastructure, putting together something very special. We have a great side on the park, a fantastic management team, a corporate structure with some heft and all of them following a well thought out plan for the future.
And even if Gerrard was a guy with a wealth of experience and this war-chest nonsense was real and not a typical Sevco fantasy, there would be no reason to change even the smallest bit of it. Our work for next season is already underway. There will be arrivals and departures according to the manager’s needs. Work on the next phrase of The Celtic Triangle will begin, and we will move forward as we’ve been doing all along.
For Brendan and the players, it will be about doing what they do best; focussing on the next game on the calendar. Nothing more complicated than that.
It won’t always be exciting. Our club conducts itself professionally and with measured assurance, secure in the knowledge we have the right ideas and are doing the right things. It won’t always be sexy because we believe in actual achievements and actual bricks and mortar growth rather than basing a business plan on fantastical nonsense about accomplishments that are clearly well out of our reach. It will not always be newsworthy; this blog can focus on Sevco and its unfolding calamities precisely because Celtic runs like a Swiss watch and that doesn’t generate the rash of headlines that a more chaotic operation does.
It will, at times, be a little bit boring. Sustainable success is achieved that way, in little moments, in boxes being ticked off one at a time, in spreadsheets showing income steadily moving in an upward direction, in taking three points here and three points there and adding them all up at the end of the season. Like building a house. One brick at a time.
The way we do things has ensured that six years after Rangers collapsed into its financial black hole that there’s simply no club in Scotland with anything near our status or power. Nothing that happens at Ibrox short of an Arab billionaire buying them as a personal play-thing will change that.
And because that’s not going to happen it does not matter what happens over there, only what happens at Celtic Park. For this to change it would take events at our club which would meet, precisely, the textbook definition of the word “catastrophe.”
And nothing we will do would ever risk that, even a little.
There is no risk, so there is no reason to take one. Celtic will carry on regardless, and that’s why when next season ends even as they are mopping up the blood from the latest massacre across the city, we will be celebrating eight in a row and looking forwards to nine.
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