There is a question that a lot of Celtic fans are asking each other across social media right now; if the optimists (and I class myself as one of them) are correct, and we still have a shot at winning this title, and if there is a sudden and dramatic turnaround, what then?
Well, that seems like a silly question to a lot of us.
What then is simple; those who pull off the miracle take a bow and exit stage left with a happier ending than they would dare to dream at the moment, where everything is grim and ghastly.
But things have to change, come what may. An unlikely victory cannot be allowed to overshadow the drastic need for a radical rethink at every level of this club.
Here I’m going to look at the need for change and why it cannot be put off, no matter what happens next.
Lennon Will Have To Go. That’s A Given.
The manager will have to depart first and foremost.
Regardless, we should be aiming to do better than Lennon, and there are plenty of people out there who could replace him and improve the quality at the same time.
This is not a hypothetical; we know this is a fact.
With a forward thinking board our attractiveness to coaches elsewhere wouldn’t even arise as a question.
Target progress in Europe instead of focussing on the domestic game and all the pieces will fall neatly into place.
Europe is where Lennon’s limitations have been most drastically shown up. Barcelona and Lazio will forever be used by his defenders as justifying his European record, but there’s a reason they are so memorable; they are the exception to the general rule.
And his tenure is littered with lamentable results and the occasional catastrophe; Sion, Prague, Copenhagen, Cluj, Ferencvaros, Braga and Utrecht.
There should be any question of letting Neil Lennon take us into another European qualifying campaign … it would be to invite disaster upon disaster. We have qualified for the Groups of one competition or the other for the last ten years – he was the last manager to fail to.
He is the biggest threat to that.
Which is to say nothing for the fact that, as I’ve said, this is his third major crisis as a manager on domestic terms alone.
There must not be a fourth.
The Board Has Scandalously Failed In A Number Of Areas.
This crisis has utterly exposed the people running our club.
They are not fit for purpose.
Our strategy has been a constant example of people riding their luck for years now; sooner or later it was always going to push us to the brink.
If this luck holds out one last time they can spend the rest of their lives dining out on stories of their own brilliance, as many a gambler does.
But we should not ignore the simple truth that gambling is exactly what we’ve been doing. Is in times of crisis that you find out who your leaders truly are, and this one has exposed them as shallow frauds and empty suits.
To be honest, looking at the mammoth strategic failures on their watch, many of us had concluded that a while back.
It’s only now that it’s become obvious to almost everyone. They’ve hidden behind the successes of the players and the managers very well … but there is no hiding place now, when the onus is on them to show us there’s a plan.
What we’ve found is that there is no plan. God alone knows who’d be running Celtic right now had Neil Lennon not been available to snatch from the dole queue.
Celtic is not a football club run by a business.
For too long Celtic has been a business running a football club.
When the numbers don’t add up it’s the football operation that suffers; this is a stupid and self-defeating way for things to work.
Players are not bought to strengthen the pool; they are bought as assets and investments. No wonder managers disavow this nonsense, no wonder some players have flopped spectacularly and we’ve made losses on them.
Other clubs don’t run things in this nonsensical fashion; this is Celtic best, and they have the cheek to call it risk-averse.
How much has this cost us in failed qualification campaigns for the Champions League?
A half dozen at least, where the manager has been woefully under resourced going into crucial games.
The board has failed to reach out to supporters. Indeed, he seems to specialise in alienating them.
The club’s one concession to the fans is never to use the term “Old Firm”, but the ethos seems to be that OF PLC is alive and well in every way that actually matters.
We have never called out the Survival Lie, although our club had a moral responsibility to do so.
We have other moral responsibilities we haven’t taken seriously; the board looks dreadful in light of those too.
From the Living Wage response The Trust initially got from the board to the shabby way they paid for it when they finally gave in to other, even more serious matters where the stance seems to be deflect, deny, ignore; these guys are going to be remembered for as much what they failed to do for some of the things that they actually did.
We Need To Hire A Manager And Leave Him Alone To Lead.
The first managerial appointment of the modern era – the Lawwell era, and we’ll get to him soon enough – was Mowbray; it was a disaster.
The second was Lennon, who had done nothing to suggest that he should be trusted with such a momentous endeavour.
His first full season in charge, the title went to Ibrox.
Rangers repeated our mistake by appointing McCoist.
Two untested managers traded slip-ups until their club went bust.
Lennon, in many ways, is one of the luckiest manager’s in Britain … but we have been over-dependent on whoever was running Ibrox managing to be even more amateurish.
When Lennon left, a combination of feeling the strategy’s glass ceiling hitting him on the head and plain exhaustion at the nature of the job, and smarting about being “offered” an assistant he had never heard of, the job was offered to Keane – who I am glad didn’t take it – but he too was told who his assistant would be.
He turned it down flat, another lucky or God knows how many years we’d have lost.
The club appointed the assistant instead.
The chance to build something early that would leave the fledgling Ibrox operation in the dust was squandered, utterly, as we went with an entirely untested appointment.
I am grateful for the changes Ronny tried to instigate; he laid some of the foundations Rodgers built on, especially as he inherited an unfit shambles of a squad and a managerial operation badly needing dragged into this century, but Deila, although a moderniser, never have the gravitas to sell these ideas to the playing squad, and especially not after Lawwell had quite deliberately call his nuts off by hand-picking John Collins as his babysitter.
The ugliness that provoked had its expression during a lamentable game against Molde.
For the second time in 20 years we didn’t mess about … Desmond flexed his muscles at last and we went out and hired Brendan Rodgers, the very best manager available. For the first year he ran his own shop, utterly, and got everything he wanted. Then the interfering started.
Daniel Arzani was first; it’s where Rodgers should have drawn the line. If he did, he didn’t draw it clearly enough. The third season summer transfer window saw our CEO at his worst, gambling over the managers targets, turning each of them into a game of chicken and we lost them all.
Think on that; we had a top tier manager who identified three key footballers he wanted to take us to the next level.
The CEO was charged with bringing them in … he failed on every one of them.
The John McGinn saga was atrocious. We replaced that blue chip target with a guy who had been released by Kilmarnock and who’d been on free list for months.
In January we upped the ante on insulting the manager by signing a winger he’d never even heard of.
If you want to defend the board for hiring the out of work Lennon as the interim manager go right ahead; I feared the worst and it turned out to be a permanent appointment, made in the showers at Hampden, with the directors induling in an orgy of self-congratulations which looked cynical, shallow and cringey even then and appears far worse now.
We brought in Lennon and then, astonishingly, denied him full control of the football operation.
The consequences of both the decision to appoint him and then the limitations we imposed on him are crystal clear.
The manager needs a free hand with the football operation completely seperate from the rest of the club … within that sphere the head coach will be King.
Which means, of course, that Celtic’s untitled director of football must be cut down first.
No Matter What Happens Next, Peter Lawwell Is Finished.
So much of what has already been written can be laid at Lawwell’s door.
This man does not know his place within the club and sometimes seems to treat it as if it is his own personal plaything to do with as he wishes.
I’ll be commenting on the boardroom last, but this needs to be said; the useless shower who masquerade as our directors have allowed the CEO this freedom and the responsibility for what he does now lies heavily on them, and Desmond in particular.
Lawwell is way too over-mighty for a mere corporate pen-pusher and in an era were CEO’s are replaced as regularly as the office lightbulbs he’s been at Celtic way too long. Whatever bright and brilliant ideas he had have long since been tried and tested.
There are so many ugly elements to his time in the role too.
Added to them was the recent revelation that he may have lied to the Celtic AGM in 2019, when he was asked about the Five Way Agreement.
His reputation was already badly damaged before that story broke this week. Now it is positively in the toilet, with the Requisitioners explicitly demanding that he play no further part in the club’s dealings with them.
That is a damning indictment of the man.
No winning run will save that man from the place now laid out for him by future Celtic historians; they will record his time as a litany of controversies and failures burnished only be the successes of managers he either underfunded or undermined and on a handful of occasions both. He prides himself on being a great gambler, so let me pose a question to those who will try and vindicate him if this greatest gamble of them all somehow pays off.
Imagine you were a passenger on a bus in one of those Central American countries you see on shows like World’s Most Dangerous Roads.
And imagine your driver was a crazy redneck who tried to take a corner at breakneck, suicidal speed out of bravado and ego and in doing so risked your life and the lives of everyone on the bus. But he made it.
How many stops along the way before you got off the bus? And wouldn’t you have a choice words for the guy – and maybe a lot more – before you did? What you wouldn’t do is risk the rest of the journey and congratulate him on his driving at the end of it.
We Need New Blood And New Ideas In The Boardroom.
Our board has often been hailed as a model of professionalism.
What they don’t have are great strategic thinkers or independent minds.
Nobody on that board, save for Desmond, has taken a major risk in the whole of their career or, I’ll wager, ever had a creative thought.
We have a board of pen-pushers and box checkers. If they were otherwise they wouldn’t allow one man, Peter Lawwell, to so totally dominate the strategy and direction.
Aside from Lawwell where are the leaders on the governing bodies?
Who wants to step into the morass at Hampden and shake things up? None of them.
Who wants to promote a new era of engagement with the game here? None of them.
Who is building bridges with the outside world? Nobody.
They are invisible men, insignificant, so much so that nobody even calls for their heads at a time when the club is being pulled apart.
The chairman is a nonentity whose last major public pronouncement was to call our fans anti-Semites because we criticised a director who just happened to be a Tory peer who had voted for austerity.
The reek of old-school unionism as well as small (and large) C conservatism stinks out the corridors of Celtic Park.
This is the modern world and ours is a thoroughly modern club, founded for charitable purposes.
It might be a good idea if it was run by creative, modern people with compassion and a social conscience instead of these tired old men.
Only Real And Lasting Change Stands Any Chance Of Fixing This Club.
This crisis has exposed major fault lines between the club and the fans.
It has shown up our directors as people entirely without a long-term strategy.
It has shown us the worst of Peter Lawwell and Dermot Desmond.
It has revealed Lennon to be a stubborn, arrogant manager who struggles when put under pressure.
And yet although walking wounded, we’re not yet dead in this league race.
Although out of one cup competition, and shamed in Europe, we still have things to play for.
The Lennonites cling to the idea that we’ve come back under before and can do it again.
But we’ve seen and learned things here that can’t be seen or unlearned.
Almost everyone believes that keeping Lennon in charge of the team right now is a colossal and even insane gamble.
Should our club really be run on that basis? Even if the gamble pays off?
The protests outside the ground continue, pinned to the fences our own directors have set up against us.
The manager is no longer the target of the fury; most have made up their minds about him.
The problem is those who hired him and those who choose to leave him where he is, to take the flak, to soak up the pressure.
No winning run is going to put this thing back together again; something broke these past few weeks, something that can’t be fixed.
A rift open up between the club and the fans that will not be healed or lessened or made better by good results on the pitch.
Only change, real and lasting change, will put this right again.
Please read our article on our new Facebook strategy, and bookmark the sites mentioned in it.