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This Team Of Charlatans Never Showed Up For Celtic Today.

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You cannot go from winning four trebles in a row to that cowardly, inept surrendering of the final trophy of what was meant to be an historic and momentous campaign without having to face a harsh verdict from history.

That’s what awaits this team today.

The most dominant team in the recent history of the game in Scotland folded today like a bad card player holding a bum hand. It crumpled like a cardboard box left out in the rain.

Everything I expected to see from them today was absent, and most notable of all was that sense of pride in what they had done prior to this season, which was nowhere to be seen.

Every member of that squad should feel a sense of embarrassment and even shame after that display.

I am loathe to give pass marks to one of them, even young Welsh, who did nothing terribly wrong but who cannot be spared the damnation lest he come to believe that a surrender on this scale is somehow acceptable if you give the bare minimum of effort to the cause.

That was a disaster on an epic scale, mirroring the greater disaster at the club itself which has unfolded over this season, but where the roots lie in one of the most disgraceful decisions ever taken by the board of directors of a major institution, the one that paved the way for this regression, this utter disintegration, this collapse into ruin.

I refer, of course, to the shower scene from Hampden, which has inspired more nightmares than the one from Psycho now by many degrees of magnitude and is gorier by far.

That team is done.

That was not a Celtic performance today; that was a team of imposters posing in Celtic shirts. They have gone from being the most potent, lethal, side in Scottish football, from being a winning machine, to this in the space of a single campaign. It damns them and it damns those inside Celtic whose fingerprints are all over it.

Desmond, Lawwell and Bankier, this is your legacy.

This is the campaign for which you’ll all be remembered. This utter disaster. This meltdown. This calamity. And the next campaign starts in just over two months and we don’t even know who the manager is going to be.

Shame on all of them, from the boardroom down.

What follows are my individual ratings for the players today. As I said, pass marks are hard to come by.

And some of them ought never to pull on the shirt again.

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