The worst season in living memory took the surreal turn into darkness we were all hoping we could avoid today, and there was a certain inevitability about it.
Upon our return from a trip we should never have gone on, we tested players for the bug, found that one had it and had to report that to NHS Scotland who’s test and trace team have been looking into it over the weekend.
And the result is that 13 players have been told to self-isolate, which means they miss tonight’s game. Which means they will almost certainly miss the weekend’s game as well.
We will have to play both of those matches with skeleton teams. We ought not even to attempt to postpone the fixtures, because we did this to ourselves and that would carry the sentence that comes with that; two 3-0 forfeits.
Anybody still harbouring hopes of winning the league?
The worst thing about this today is that most Celtic fans I’ve already spoken to aren’t even terribly angry. There’s a weary resignation that our club is run by the kind of people you wouldn’t trust to watch your dog for the weekend.
The artifice of competence and of any sort of vision beyond the immediate horizon has been ripped away during a season where dithering, delay, egotism and machismo have been revealed as the driving forces behind the men in our boardroom.
Those fans who can muster anger know exactly where the anger belongs; it is being directed at the club.
The club has more than earned it. Every warning about the stupidity of the Dubai trip was waived aside as our club determined that they were above considerations like public opinion, the safety of our players and the health of the nation as a whole.
The club founded to feed the starving of Glasgow’s east end decided that it’s players, coaches and officials deserved a wee sojourn to a millionaires playground after months of failures at a time when every other person in this country was being told to stay at home and where many have already missed out on Christmases and birthdays with friends and family.
“The Greater Good? What’s the Greater Good?” seemed to be our attitude in a nutshell.
The views of the public didn’t matter a damn.
The views of our supporters were given the same contemptuous dismissal that they have been all the way through this season. Our club richly deserved a denouement like this, and somebody at Parkhead should pay for this with his job.
This trip was okayed from the very top.
If the people who okayed it have a sense of responsibility at all they will issue an apology to the country and to the fans and it will be accompanied by their resignations.
The folly of this was obvious. The arrogance of it was breath-taking.
It is only fitting that the cost of it should be momentous and that it should be paid, in full, by those who gambled not only with what’s left of our season, but the safety of themselves, the players, their families and the general wellbeing of the community as a whole.
It is beyond reckless.
It was madness, and our club and those who run it should now prepare to accept whatever consequences it brings.
For some inside Parkhead there is no coming back from this.