You have to credit McInnes for his consistency if nothing else; this is a guy who never gives us credit for anything, and he wasn’t about to start last night. His side hasn’t scored in a goal in five games; that’s an unwanted record. They can’t buy a win. The talked about challenging for third but at the moment could easily find themselves fifth.
But losing last night was the fault of a bad referee!
Every have the feeling that you’ve heard this song before? And before? And before?
Every manager we’ve been in the past few matches has fallen back on the same pitiful excuse. I suppose if I was a boss who’d been beaten by Lennon I might be scrambling around for them too, but it’s wearisome when you know that actually none of them has a point. Every decision we get in our favour gets this same relentless scrutiny right now.
We could have whipped his lot to within an inch of their sanity last night and he’d have spoken about breaks of the ball, offside decisions, unpunished tackles and found a way to make it seem as if we’d just gotten lucky.
I’ve never, in all my years watching his team get beaten by ours, heard him give us an ounce of credit without trying to retract it with some pitiful sob story about how hard done by they were. The only people in Scotland who feel less satisfied with their manager than Celtic fans are the poor sods who have to watch this joker on the touchline every week.
I have written relentlessly critical pieces about McInnes on this site and a lot of people can’t understand why I am so hard on one particular manager when his name isn’t Neil Lennon. The answer is simple; I want us to have a challenger that isn’t the one at Ibrox and Aberdeen is more than capable of being that club, if they have the right leadership.
I have no great soft-spot in my heart for Aberdeen, but they have the right ideas, a boisterous and reasonably big following, they are run on a professional, sustainable basis and only need some smarts in the dugout and in the football department to grow.
McInnes has held them back in the same way Lennon’s appointment has held us back. Both clubs should be looking outside of Scottish football’s painfully restrictive old boys network and even beyond these shores; I would love to see Celtic adopt a European model, preferably a German one, and I am sure Aberdeen would easily establish themselves as the best of the rest if they did the same, and in particular because I genuinely believe there will be another Ibrox crisis.
Last night they were functional but nothing to be terribly concerned about. A team with some firepower in it could have given us a rougher night but whilst McInnes is warming the manager’s seat for a better man they will never rise above his level.
On top of that, and in spite of turning their job down, he still sees the world through an Ibrox lens. He was smart enough to turn them down at the time, but I think he dreamed that one day, when they were in better nick, that he’d get a second chance at it.
He certainly never has a good word to say about us.
I wasn’t joking when I said to my old man at full time last night that he would come out with some random nonsense to explain the defeat; some reason our goal shouldn’t have stood or some decision that didn’t go their way.
Imagine my lack of surprise to read the headlines this morning.