Well the Celtic board has been busy today, pursuing a strategy of “divide and conquer” with friends in various places swinging the boot at the fans and trying to turn this into a debate about the behaviour of a few neds, and whether the “echo chamber” of social media has whipped up hate against the manager and the club from a handful of yahoos.
It’s risible.
It’s an Ibrox tactic, and one that has been very effective over there, where their fans are pliable and gullible and where any dissent is quickly squashed.
The intent here was to suggest that all of the club’s critics are ungrateful malcontents, rendering our criticisms of the manager and the overarching strategy of the club as wholly unreasonable.
It’s nothing but a deflection tactic, although not a particularly good one.
Because although it buys them a day’s headlines, it does nothing to actually fix what’s wrong inside the club.
Indeed, it amplifies the impression that the board views the fans with a certain amount of contempt.
If they respected our opinions, they wouldn’t try to characterise them as destructive.
They might even listen to them from time to time.
The level of the anger last night was over the top. The anger itself was not.
This is not about a handful of bad results; this is about the overall direction of the club. This is about an obvious deterioration in standards and ambition at the very top of the house, about their failure to articulate a positive vision for the future, it’s about the lack of a visible plan for it.
Neil Lennon’s appointment on a short-term basis was defended by a lot of our fans on the grounds that he provided what was needed in that moment; a steady hand who knew the club and what was required of him.
Many disagreed. We could see it for what it was, a dress rehearsal for his permanent return and the end of our forward momentum.
It was the appointment of a board which had no idea how to move forward.
So they moved backwards instead.
Why do you think the names we’re linked with in the papers are so uninspiring? Because the hacks know our directors have no clear idea of where they want this club to go next, and so are perfectly capable of another lamentable, backward step.
Gordon Strachan? Martin O’Neill?
Didn’t we try that a decade go?
Has football progress stood still?
What this club needs is a clean break from that whole era and a progressive appointment which takes us into the future.
We need the next management team to do more than just win a handful of titles and trophies; we need one which will build something that lasts.
We need a complete re-tool of the upper management of the club.
We waste far too much money. We are inefficient in our policies. Look at the makeup of the squad right now; top heavy in central midfielders whilst on the left we have a winger on loan and on the right an injured James Forrest and no replacements for either.
We have four strikers and spend much of our time playing one up front. Against Ferencvaros we didn’t even do that.
Our team looks unfit. The defence cannot organise.
The manager actually spoke after we’d been beaten yesterday about finally working on corners, when that’s plagued us for as long as any of us can remember.
Will he be in the job long enough to finally work out that we’re shockingly susceptible to counter attacks?
My God, it’s woeful.
We know there are problems with how the team is coached and trained and that this has caused problems in the dressing room.
We know that some members of the team are decidedly unimpressed by the manager by comparison to the one who was here before.
We know this is a contributing factor in why a number of them want to leave.
And because we do know these things, it is reasonable to assume that those who run the club know all these things as well, and yet they’ve spent months now, since this season started, watching this unravelling in front of them, without taking action to remedy it … unless you including giving Gavin Strachan a job, which seems only to have made matters worse.
We are where we are right now solely because of bad leadership inside Parkhead.
Those in charge of our club have allowed a dire situation to get worse and in a final, desperate attempt to deflect the blame from themselves they want your focus and my focus and the focus of everyone who matters on last night’s events instead of what sparked them.
Do not let them distract you with this garbage.
There is one subject worth our time and attention today and it’s the future of the manager.
All else is just noise.
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