Which means that the strategic leak to the media last night was a barefaced lie.
The longer the Tierney saga drags on the clear it becomes that Arsenal are at it here, and doing everything they can to unsettle the player so that they can get him on the cheap.
Last night, someone told the media that Arsenal had made an improved bid that met Celtic’s valuation.
Who was that?
Was it someone at Celtic Park? Why would it be?
We have a figure which we believe the player is worth.
We’ve made that figure known. We’ve made our position clear. We can sit and do nothing if that’s what we want.
Tierney has a long term deal. Nobody can “wait us out” here.
This is not Dembele, this is not someone who will down tools and refuse to play unless he gets to go.
Tierney will be at Parkhead until Celtic gets an offer they can accept and only the truly arrogant south of the border thinks otherwise.
They may unsettle Tierney with talk of the big wages on offer, but they will not unsettle him enough that he starts banging on the manager’s door. They have misjudged the player completely here, but they’ve also misjudged Celtic.
Lennon might want to do big things with this squad, but there’s sufficient cash to do that right now without endangering us.
He won’t get everything he wants … but he will get what he needs.
And that means that Lennon won’t be banging on the door of the boardroom.
Arsenal aren’t going to get Tierney for less than £25 million, and they had better start coming to terms with that simple fact.
They either make an offer that Celtic can accept or they stand down.
It’s put up or shut up time.
They are the only people who will be humiliated here; Celtic will stay firm and in the end either Arsenal go somewhere else or they write a very big cheque.
What they are doing right now is tantamount to tapping, and I would caution them against continuing to rattle their sabre through the media as they are doing right now.
Celtic may just stick another £5 million on the asking price for having been put through all this trouble.