As we move into cup week, more Bet365 betting opportunities, and the inevitable avalanche of media headlines and attempts to unsettle us before it, I think it’s probably worth looking at the coverage of the Eddie Howe situation since a clickbait site said, last week, that he was talking to Palace.
First up, do we believe it? The truth is that I don’t.
Not because there isn’t something plausible about the story – the idea that Howe’s team is talking off the record to some interested parties is not in the least hard to swallow – but because the website that ran it runs a dozen “exclusives” a week and all of them are rank rotten and often even ridiculous.
I don’t think they have a scrap of actual knowledge about what Howe is getting up to, and so any story out there which is based on theirs from last week should be filed under “highly dubious” and ignored.
If Howe is talking to Palace there will be mainstream sports desks writing about it soon enough; the press in Scotland might not know this stuff, but the English based media certainly will.
Let’s be honest, if Howe slips past us he’s not doing it for football reasons.
It’s about one of two things; it’s either about money or it’s about his not getting the type of control at Celtic that he wants. I wrote about this last night. If people on our board think that any top manager is going to come to the club without that sort of control they are quite mad.
We’ll end up with John Kennedy by default, as the only one who’ll want the gig.
If the issue is money there’s almost certainly nothing we can do about that, as the EPL can pay such ludicrous salaries that trying to match even a Palace would be utterly futile.
If he’s only in it for the money, then it’s better we find that out now rather than give ourselves a hostage to fortune later on by putting him in the job and having heart palpitations with every Sky Sports Breaking News bar for the next three years.
To me that won’t arise. He’ll either go for the money this time around or go to a club that can satisfy his footballing ambitions, which will be us. We know Howe will have EPL clubs interested in him, this is just a fact of life.
If he turns down a couple of them and signs up with us now, then we’re probably in good shape when others come calling.
It’s always possible that a job will come up later which is too good for him to turn down, but what kind of job would that be?
That’s what I want to take a look at.