Tonight Low Hope Became No Hope. Celtic Fans Should Focus On What’s Next.

We had little hope that this campaign could be turned around before the kick-off tonight.

What shred of it was left was extinguished in the last minute of the game. Low hope has become no hope.

The 2020-21 season will end in failure for Celtic, for Lennon, for Lawwell and for the board whose last chance to salvage it was squandered in November.

The events of the last few days, and the colossal, calamitous, disastrous and self-inflicted nature of them, are the capstone for what has been a ruinous season. Reputations have been destroyed.

Careers may well have been ended. For some, they undoubtedly should be. Historical verdicts, damning verdicts, are going to be returned on a lot of people inside Parkhead.

There are some who simply cannot be at Celtic Park when the last whistle blows on the last day of the season. Lawwell and Lennon should be first to go, but they cannot be the last.

Bankier certainly should join them. Desmond has shown that his ego matters more than our club and its reputation. He offers us nothing. He doesn’t even attend the AGM.

Tonight, I don’t feel any particular anger, far less the sense of grief that I thought I might feel at seeing our final flicker of hope extinguished. I’m a realist. I’ve known for weeks and perhaps months that this wasn’t going to be our year.

I knew it for sure when the board didn’t terminate Lennon’s services the morning after we lost to Ross County.

At that point, they made it clear that machismo posturing was the club’s strategy, that Lennon would be retained to spite us, that our views were not important.

They were going to “tough it out” no matter how ridiculous that posture was, no matter how damaging, no matter how self-defeating.

Who knew their capacity for self-delusion would lead to self-destruction?

Well, all of us did actually. And many of us said so at the time.

So I don’t feel anger, or a sense of loss, or even the frustration that has characterised much of what we’ve seen in this campaign. I know any “success” at Ibrox will be fleeting because it’s built on a sand.

That club is so consumed in its own paroxysms of self-gratification and egotism that it will do what clubs from there always do when riding high; they will over-extend.

There are opportunities for Celtic if we are blessed with the right leadership. Which means other than the present leadership. Those running the club right now have abrogated any right they had to take us forward.

They have no strategy. They have no vision. They have no emotional feel for the support. The last few weeks have shattered any moral authority they had left.

Having cast this season aside, this is now about our future.

I would be happy if we never again saw Lennon in the dugout.

I would be happy if the pictures we saw of Lawwell in the stand were the last time we did.

I don’t think we’ll get our wish on either score; this board of directors is incapable of self-analysis and couldn’t give a toss what we think.

Nobody is going to do the right thing, the decent thing, the honourable thing.

We aren’t dealing here with men of honour or principle, or they have already gone.

Whatever shreds of legitimacy they had have been wiped out by the last few days as surely as any right Trump had left to see out his term without being further shamed and disgraced evaporated last week.

None of them is going to change now, or find some public conscience now, or do anything, even this late in the day, to restore even a modicum of their reputations.

They don’t know how.

They care more about appearing strong, about tending their egos, than they do about Celtic.

Instead, they revel in past glories and achievements either real or imagined, and genuinely believe they’ve been wronged.

That mind-set dripped from every word of the club statement today.

Our future is what’s at stake now. Next season. The one after that. The one after that.

Because the rot is setting in, and unless we dig it out our club really could fold like a house of cards, making real King’s idiotic prediction. Our current leaders are more than capable of making this crisis worse.

Don’t be under any illusions that these men can sort this out.

It’s going to come down to us, all of us, to save this thing.

It’s going to require us putting real, and sustained, pressure on these people, and there are ways to do it which don’t involve protests far less storming the citadel. We’re in a brave new world.

Our board understand the language of money and we can talk in that language because when it comes to money we’re all the club has. We don’t have a sugar-daddy owner and considering the identity of the only likely candidate I’m glad we don’t.

Every penny the club has, every penny the club makes, comes from us and it will not take much of a squeeze to snap those members of the board who have yet remained silent and mute and weak out of their lethargy and some balance will return to this equation.

All who want to be saved have to understand that a change is gonna come, and it either comes from inside the boardroom or it’s going to come from the stands, and that doesn’t mean filling them with banners, it means keeping them empty, keeping them shut.

The fundamental strength of our club lies in our hands, and if we want Celtic to be strong we may have to temporarily make it weak. It’s not any easy choice. It’s not something anyone would want.

But those currently running things at Parkhead have led us to a place where the damage they are doing is real, and presents us with hard choices.

Those choices cannot be put off for much longer.

They have to be faced, and they have to be made.

All of us will have to decide what we’re willing to do, because we’re all there is.

Our leaders have utterly failed us, and they have to pay the price for that.