Amidst my efforts to put an optimistic face on the day, there was Gordon Strachan.
His comments in the papers this morning are idiotic at best, and at worst could be actively dangerous.
It has been a long time since Strachan understood the Celtic support.
He frequently talks utter garbage about us, but today is easily the worst.
First he doesn’t think the fans need to know anything.
Then it’s that in fact, the fans don’t want to know anyway and that it’s the media that’s pushing all these demands for information. Is he totally disconnected from reality or what?
Strachan’s contempt for ordinary football supporters is both widely known and wholly abhorrent.
I have never warmed to the man because of it.
In spite of making a nice living from fans paying their money he has never viewed us with anything other than contempt.
There is a lot of crap talked about Strachan not being appreciated by some in our support because he’s not “one of our own.”
Actually, it’s because he used the phrase “Kestrel drinkers with devil dogs” to describe a section of our support once upon a time, in one of his many idiotic gratuitous insults against football fans in general.
I never took it personally only because he has the same sneering disregard for all supporters, so it really wasn’t anything against ours in particular.
But the man sounds like a prize idiot when he talks about fans in the ways he often does, and for the rest of the time he just sounds like an arrogant arsehole.
In his contempt for fans he has never sought to understand them.
But he knows how to suck up to those in authority alright.
He seems so pro-board at times that it’s embarrassing, but then, that might well have something to do with the club hiring not one but two of his sons, and their still being on the books at the moment.
No wonder he, personally, is in no hurry for the changing of the guard.
Even as they masquerade as our staff members, Strachan’s son’s, with him, run a very expensive “elite football education” business; my antennae pricked up when I first learned that, and I’d be interested to know if our club utilises its services.
If Strachan thinks – as he says he does – that the club don’t need to tell the fans anything then perhaps he’s got good reasons for wanting them to be silent. If he wants to talk crap like that then he had better understand that his own motives are going to be scrutinised.
The more I listen to him the more I hear a guy who has swallowed the Lawwell playbook whole … or maybe Lawwell swallowed his. He talks about how hard it is to get in players prior to the Champions League qualifiers … utter drivel as many clubs manage it comfortably.
This is an early excuse for the board in case their tardiness writes those qualifiers off … a quite unforgivable failure on their part and which everyone watching can see happening because of how long this has taken.
Yet this has been the mantra of our club since Lawwell came in and has probably cost us tens of millions of pounds from missed qualifications at the very least.
Indeed, you can see the proof that this theory is arrant nonsense in the number of players we’ve managed to sell both before and even during Champions League qualifying campaigns.
I still reckon Lennon decided to go when he saw his team weakened in every consecutive qualifying round in the last season of his first term at the club … despite beating Barcelona the year before.
I admire and respect Strachan for his record as a manager, but honestly as a person I think I’d find him insufferable in about two seconds.
He’s so far up his own backside it’s unreal, but even those people talk a little sense from time to time.
When he’s talked about us lately he’s lamentably failed to do so.