Celtic is continuing to push onwards with plans for introducing our colts team into the Lowland League, a plan which a lot of fans cannot see the slightest merit in at all.
There are a lot of things wrong with the proposal.
For openers, it would put our young players up against part-time footballers every week.
Nobody has adequately explained how that will improve their standards in any way, shape or form.
On the surface of it, a series of intra-squad friendlies would provide us with a tougher challenge and a better opportunity for our players to develop.
Did senior people in our youth academy actually approve of this? I find that hard to believe.
You don’t have to be a genius to work out how little value there is in this from a footballing point of view. I cannot believe that serious coaches think this is a good call. It stinks of something forced on them from somewhere else in the club.
On top of that, the reek of Old Firm Inc. clings to this and it’s that very odour on it that has killed the idea of the colt teams starting at a higher level.
Clubs aren’t interested in a scheme which benefits only two teams, and they certainly aren’t going to accept anything that looks, sounds and smells like a stitch-up, even if it comes with money attached.
Thirdly, this is another example of us getting into bed with the Ibrox club, and I’m not talking about the Old Firm Inc stink, but just the very idea of it.
Later on today I’m going to do a piece on the Scott Brown incident at Ibrox after the last game there … these aren’t the kind of people we should be following into anything.
That club is not run by serious people and too many of its upper echelon are bigoted gutter trash we should have nothing to do with.
No sooner were these plans in the public domain but their CEO was picking a fight with the governing bodies for no reason at all, and being called a liar by the SFA President.
We shouldn’t be within miles of any involvement with those who run that club; they are reckless, unprofessional, a rabble and an embarrassment.
More than anything else – and this is what troubles me more than all of the other stuff put together – this is a flagrant attempt to game the system, and insert two teams into the pyramid in a place where they don’t belong, without the consent of teams above and below them on the scale.
In short, this is a blatant example of what fans of this club were instrumental in preventing in 2012, on the grounds of sporting integrity. We were entirely right to be furious about those attempts.
Those fans of clubs in the leagues affected are entirely right to be angry now.
This blatantly ignores all the precepts of the meritocratic system which we fought for at the time and which we continue to laud as being in the best interests of the whole game.
This is the Super League by another name.
The Sevco stitch-up by another name.
On a smaller scale, for sure, but no different in what it represents.
We are bribing our way into a league setup where we do not belong, and no argument will justify that.
I think we should gracefully walk away from these proposals, and admit that we got this one wrong.
We should offer to work with other clubs towards a permanent solution to the youth teams problem, and try to find some common ground instead of this.
These kind of things make our club seem arrogant and elitist and self-interested.
They don’t do anything for our wider reputation or for the wider game.
It’s another complete mess from our board of directors and another example of them saying one thing about the ethos of this club and then doing another thing entirely. It’s as if they just don’t get it at all.