Have Celtic had enough yet?
Has the club started to process how serious this is getting?
The Mourinho rumours which are sweeping through the internet today, with national newspapers now saying that we’ve made an approach and been rebuffed, suggest that our club is an anarchic disaster area.
Instead of looking like we have steady, serious people at the tiller it looks schizophrenic, as if the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
In the absence of information during a crisis, people will let their imaginations run wild.
Rumours spring out of the ground like weeds, and spread faster.
Disinformation campaigns are launched by those who wish to stir up trouble.
The Mourinho story feels like one of those, like something put out there by our enemies, something designed to make us look like we’re now desperate and trying to grab warm bodies off the sidewalk because our preferred options have turned us down.
Behind the scenes, things may well be calm, but from out here it looks like a mess.
The club is losing control of the narrative and that could be disastrous.
The danger in this is that if we appoint some left-field candidate now – someone who wasn’t in the newspapers – it’s not going to look like we got the “best man for the job”, it is going to look like we worked our way down a long, long list until we got somebody who said yes.
That will hamstring the guy right out of the gate.
He can forget a honeymoon, and the club can forget about getting a season ticket bounce on the back of the appointment.
We all appreciate that Dominic McKay isn’t long in his job, but a lot of us are surprised that he didn’t open his tenure up with a series of media interviews in which he offered some reassurance about how things are progressing on the multiple fronts we’re engaging with.
Look, in a crisis people need to feel that those making the decision have a handle on things.
Even if what we get is soft-soaping a lot of folk will appreciate that.
It will let us see that there’s someone in the building, at least, someone working away on solutions. It’s a leadership thing; you offer people a friendly face and tell them that even if you can’t give them answers there and then that the answers are coming, that progress is being made.
At the same time, you can put to do bed some of the more egregious rumours.
Harmful stories can be squashed.
The very act of doing so lets you take control of the news agenda again; an interview with Dominic McKay in which he shares even the most basic facts will be the headline story right across the media, both old and new, for days.
It is only the beginning of course; we’re going to need more than just some feel-good and soundbites to get past where we are right now but those things can raise morale and give people a reason to look forward to the future with something other than dread.
And every one of us needs that right now, instead of this constant cycle of rumours which do nothing but weaken us and divide us and keep us arguing amongst ourselves.