There is a perception amongst our supporters and amongst many in the media that the Eddie Howe deal has to be done, because otherwise Celtic would simply move on from it.
There is a perception that we can’t be possibly still be waiting on his decision, because that would be lunacy with so much that can go wrong. I believe that the deal has to be done for those very reasons.
But you know what? I won’t be surprised if I’m wrong.
I won’t be surprised if all of us are wrong. I won’t be surprised if the club is every bit as incompetent as it looks from the outside. Don’t assume anything. Don’t just believe that it’ll all be alright.
In a very short space of time, the club will be sending out the season ticket renewal forms and a lot of people assume that they won’t do this until there’s solid information on all this stuff.
Don’t assume that either.
I think there’s a very good chance that when those renewals go out that we’ll be exactly where we are right now; the whole club in limbo, waiting for something to happen.
At that point the club is going to have to do some fast talking, but if there’s one thing I have learned from Celtic it’s that they are very good at the appeals to emotion rather than reason, and the board will be confident that they can use those appeals to sway enough folk to renew. They may not even be wrong in that arrogant assumption.
If you’ve looked at how we’ve done thing these last few years the current stasis will be entirely familiar and that scares me quite a bit. I cannot imagine how we can think messing about with Howe instead of tying him down is a good idea, just as I cannot imagine how we could name some left-field candidate manager now without eating a lot of dirt.
But that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen.
I would have put every penny in my pockets on John McGinn signing and after Lawwell’s public posturing about waiting a few months to get him on a free transfer it looked as if we had already sewn up the deal with the player and his people and that we were leaving Petrie with no choice at all.
I wrote something not dissimilar to that at the time. And I was dead wrong. Every site which said this is how it would play out was dead wrong.
Lawwell made a similar threat to Charlton over Alfie Doughty in the summer and with McGinn fresh in mind I said it was lunacy and was likely to end in disaster and it did.
The public pronouncements and the confidence in no way reflected the reality.
Having been bitten by the club over these things and others I think it right that we all maintain a healthy scepticism here, and especially if the season ticket forms come out.
The club cannot ask fans for money when so much is still up in the air, and it would be mad to trust these people after this campaign and the litany of dreadful errors in it.
Our “faith” is not based on anything real; it’s based on “even they can’t be this stupid and incompetent can they?” I don’t believe they are, but I never believed they could be as incompetent as they have been either.
We’re betting everything on them having upped their game, but as I’ll point out tomorrow there is a t least one big piece of evidence that suggests they’ve not.
Enjoy your night guys and gals.