Trust The Sunday Mail to break my good vibes of a morning.
On one hand you have Gordon Waddell telling every the world what every Celtic fans know; that we need to do more than just sign Odsonne Edouard. Guess what? Everyone at Celtic Park knows it as well and nobody at Celtic Park had any intention of “standing still” as his article puts it.
It’s not preaching to the choir; this is preaching to the stupid.
Another take-off from that article, another issue I want to cover before moving on; standing still is not the same as going backwards. Standing still is standing still. Going backwards is something entirely different so the lines “If you’re standing still you’re going backwards” are simply clear-cut nonsense and that ought to go without saying.
Waddell says that everyone “from Winston Churchill to Lauren Bacall” have used the expression; I can’t find any proof that Churchill ever said such a thing, but he did once say that “I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
Perhaps that jabbering nonsense will make its way into one of his columns sometime, and it should be taken just as seriously if it does.
Waddell doesn’t even have a central point to his piece; he starts out painting a doom and gloom picture, aided and abetted by his headline writer, but by the end admits what we all already know; that new arrivals will come and that Celtic will be stronger. So what, pray tell, was the point? There appears to be none.
In the same article, he went through the current state of the Celtic team, and aside from bumming up Stuart Armstrong as our “go-to middle-to-front playmaker and best game-changing backup if he’s fit” – not a ringing endorsement exactly, is it? – he went on to write this about Dedryck. “(He) still registers far too often on the bomb-scare meter, despite his clear qualities.”
Not words I disagree with.
I wrote a lengthy piece on Dedryck just last week, in which I said more or less the same, but I also added that I thought he was a vastly improved player from the one we signed and then we he focusses on straight up defending he does just fine.
But imagine my surprise, having read that, when I saw that the same paper is touting Dedryck for a move to Italy, at Lazio. And the source of this alleged story? An Italian website. I had a look at it, and if there’s a story there about Del it’s buried fairly deep.
And it never ceases to amaze me how good these people are at research, when they want to be. It never ceases to amaze me how well they can perform when they put their minds to it. But it begs the question, an obvious question at that; why is it always garbage like this they chose to focus on? Why don’t they look into some of the issues sites like this have raised over the years, if they’re so focused and intent on “doing the news”?
Boyata has a year left on his current deal.
Brendan wants him to sign an extension, and unlike with Armstrong there is no indication from the big man that he views his sees his future somewhere else. On the contrary, he says he’s committed to Celtic and wants to stay, so I do expect that situation to be resolved and probably when the World Cup is over.
Until then, I know we’re going to have to put up with this kind of thing. I always did.
And of course, it was The Record / Sunday Mail leading the way; that was always going to be the case too.
But there’s one thing in Waddell’s piece I agree with 100% and it’s when he talked about how content people at Celtic are to allow other people to raise a rabble whilst we do things in a thorough, professional manner.
None of the background noise will affect how Celtic does its business, nor the timeframe in which we’re doing it.