This is a strange transfer deadline day, because this has been a strange transfer window.
I’ve written very little during it and none of it was on potential signings.
This isn’t really going to be a piece on signings either, because although that’s my remit here at The CelticBlog the simple truth is that I couldn’t give a toss and no-one else does either.
So we’re chasing some young loanees in a variety of positions? Big deal.
I suspect we’ll end up with some third-tier option designed as a crowd pleaser, like the baseball bat ned Declan Gallagher.
You know what? At this point, who cares?
This window has been exceptional for how completely it has wasted everybody’s time.
The club should have had a new manager in place months ago, and he could have spent this window weeding out the dreck and shipping out any non-triers.
That was its best possible use.
It has been squandered entirely, the predictable consequence of this board’s lamentable decision to give Lennon more time.
And then more time.
And then more time.
And then more time.
You get the drift, right?
Added to that, there’s nothing to play for in terms of the league title anymore, and nobody at Parkhead seems particularly concerned with the rest of the campaign. That guarantees us even more pain.
Like James I don’t believe we’ll win the Scottish Cup even if the tournament is somehow able to be played.
Our team is in complete melt-down. The club is freefalling. Continue as we are and second place might not even be secure. Yet there are still no signs that anything is going to change.
Everyone has chucked it. These feel like the last month’s of Trump’s America … the leadership has just flung down the tools and is leaving everyone to their own devices.
This has been the most horrendous mismanagement.
But if you stop for a minute and pause, and you look at this thing as just another transfer window, ignoring all the background chaos which surrounds it, what do you see?
To be blunt, you see the same dithering, delaying and incompetence we’ve been watching unfold during these things for many years.
It seems exceptional only because the conditions we find ourselves in are exceptional; in point of fact, this has been a pretty normal, pretty standard, calamity filled rush to the deadline day.
Celtic has been screwing up transfer windows for years now.
Lawwell’s policy of waiting until the very last available minute before he closes deals is a bizarre and dangerous gamble he has pulled again and again and again and it’s cost us again and again and again.
Ben Davies would have signed for Celtic weeks ago.
But Lawwell wanted a final day’s unveiling, a big grand gesture so as to try and convince people he still knew what he was doing.
And like with McGinn and dozens of others down through the years – players who almost literally slipped through our fingers – here we go again. Hopefully for the last time.
I can’t even muster anger at what I’m reading today, with us scrambling around for some last minute deal because we took the choice not to close our business in a timely fashion.
We are now desperately trying to cobble together a Plan B and weakening our midfield by letting Ntcham go out on loan.
Don’t look for logic. Don’t look for joined up thinking.
It’s been a long, long time since our transfer business followed any sort of coherent plan, and don’t look for one as long as certain people are still at the club.
This is another Lawwell inspired disaster, but I’m used to them now and all of us should be.
How many times have we come out windows saying “well we’ve decided to gamble”?
Too many to count.
We can rant and rave about the goals we lose from set-pieces and how Lennon never seems to learn certain lessons … well that comes from the top of the house, and it results in days like today, when we look weak and pathetic and amateurish and too slow out of the gate.
What’s worse is that it’s become so common as to be just accepted.
A reversal like the one we’ve just suffered over Davies should rock a club to its foundations and be a genuine cause for concern.
This is business as usual under Lawwell.
It’s happened so often it doesn’t even hurt anymore.
It’s happened so often it barely registers as a surprise.
I don’t know how long we had Davies on our list of targets, but we identified Alfie Doughty way last year, but didn’t close a deal because Lawwell was totally convinced we would secure him on a free.
That one crashed and burned weeks ago and we went on to repeat the same mistake with an even better player.
Lawwell is a blinkered idiot, still convinced of his own genius, and the board watches this guy do this over and over again and lets him get away with it. So we get what we deserve.
But the Davies fiasco sits amidst the flaming wreckage of an entire season and the dismantling of the myths surrounding this board and Lawwell in particular.
Those myths should have been revealed as smoke and mirrors trickery years ago.
No, there’s nothing exceptional about our disastrous failures in this window; it’s the way things are and it’s the way things have been at Celtic for a long time.
At this club history repeats itself over and over and over again.
This one has done so as both tragedy and farce.
The Rumour Guy is a Celtic fan and blogger from Glasgow.