Remember when I first wrote that Peter Lawwell genuinely believed, once, that he would get a statue outside Celtic Park? I wasn’t kidding. Now Scott Brown has become the first person at the club to actually publicly say this in all apparent seriousness.
The idea is not just ludicrous, it is insulting.
Brown is entitled to hero worship “Peter” to his heart’s content. He can commission his own statue and put it up in his own garden. But Lawwell will never be commemorated at Parkhead and nor should he be.
The man who saved Celtic was Fergus McCann. Where’s his statue? It’s nowhere.
The King of Kings never got a stand named after him, nor a permanent marker.
Most members of the Lisbon Lions never did either, not even Tommy Gemmill who’s one of only three players in the history of this island who scored in two European Cup Finals.
There is no way that we ought to be giving one to some bean-counter who leaves Parkhead under a cloud and who, for all the hype that surrounds him, leaves our club in a dreadful state.
I’ll be doing a fuller piece examining his record … but even if it stood up in the way some of his fan-boys in the media and elsewhere believe, there are more deserving candidates than him.
Lawwell must have loved certain elements of yesterday.
He will be in the job for five more months; a kind of “long goodbye” to milk the adulation from the media and his allies as much as he can. In the meantime, the new guy will be learning the ropes and getting started with the work.
Lawwell will be yesterday’s man soon enough.
What he has to realise – and what his defenders have to realise – is that you don’t get statues for turning Celtic into a selling club, for making decisions based on your own ego, for chasing a top manager out the door, for failing to reform football governance when the opportunity was there for it, for not challenging lies at the centre of our sport and for presiding over a calamitous failure in your most important campaign.
You don’t get commendations for that.
What our crisis-hit campaign revealed most brutally is what Lawwell is and always was; a triumph of hype over reality.
Like Lennon he is good in smooth sailing and calm water but put him in a crisis and he flounders and then sinks without trace.
A statue for Lawwell would be like a permanent monument to this failed campaign and all that it means.
If he’s going to be honoured in that fashion it should be at Ibrox.
He has, after all, snatched history from us and given a title to them.