Well, today we found that we’re going to be more than £40 million better off if we can reach the Group Stages of the Champions League in the 2018-19 campaign. It’s a bonanza. It’s a fortune. It’s money to burn as far as Scotland is concerned.
Honestly, it’s a lottery winner’s jackpot.
And it’s going to be harder to get our hands on that it’s ever been.
Eight qualifying games.
Jesus, that’s a lot, and if I’m reading the schedule correctly (and I’m sure people will be waiting to put me straight otherwise) they are all on consecutive weeks. That’s a mountainous task. It’s going to be extremely difficult to manoeuvre our way through it and there’s no point in being anything but straight about that.
We’re in for one Hell of a time.
Clearly, we’re going to need to strengthen the team. We’re going to need to spend money. The club was never going to be allowed to stagnate, but with such a prize on offer it’s all the more imperative that we keep on pushing forward. Anything else and we’re gambling with the big bucks.
This is a tightrope situation.
How do we handle it?
First, we need to have a little bit of faith in the team and the manager who got us here. The one thing more dangerous than failing to strengthen would be to buy too many players and have a large part of the team which has had no time to gel. The current squad will be good enough if everyone plays at his best, and we get no injuries … but you can count on exactly the opposite of those things happening, which is why we need options galore.
We can negate the risk of players failing to gel by getting our business done early, of course.
And that’s where our focus should lie, on getting our targets in with time to spare. If we do as we’ve often done, and wait for each successive round before we examine the team we’re playing with fire. The financial bounty is too big to take such risks with.
What has Brendan learned in Europe so far? A lot, and not all of it the stuff of wine and roses. It’s fair to say that some of those lessons have been harsh ones, even painful ones and not least of these the one we suffered in St Petersburg.
No-one expected us to play to the standard of the Barcelona’s and PSG’s. But we ought to have been able to punch our weight against the Russians, and that was a hard night because it exposed issues we probably didn’t fully realise we had. The team looked hesitant, even scared. They lacked an attacking, creative, spark. There’s an argument for saying that the defence and the keeper played as if they didn’t fully trust one another … it was horrible watching it.
It’s the result in Russia that troubles me, because I’ve looked at the likely teams we’re going to face in these qualifiers and, at a surface reading of it, there’s not a lot for us to fear in there. But that doesn’t tell the full story, of course, or come close to representing how perilous this is going to be. One bad night like St Petersburg is all its going to take and it’s over and there are teams in there which, on their home turf, will represent a serious risk.
But Brendan has to know, by now, where the real problems in this team are to be found. He clearly anticipated Marvin Compper playing a role in the coming campaign, although it’s unclear if he still does. But Compper has not played as many games as we’d have liked, and so we can’t know how he’ll do if he’s thrown in at the deep end … that’s really messed with the plan because it’s pretty apparent that he was signed with these games in mind.
Yet we’re in no worse a position here than we’d be if we’d signed a brand new player. If he’s got a future here and we bring in a few more before pre-season training starts then the squad will be stronger going into the games than it finished in Russia.
And that might make the difference, that and the freshness a new season brings and our tendency these last few years to raise our game when we have to. But Russia haunts us, and that is the ghost we must exorcise if we’re going to reach that £40 million plus.