As a new week begins, we’re all waiting, though hopefully not with baited breath, for some signs, at last, that our club has some clue what on earth it is doing. I remain firmly on the belief that we will appoint Eddie Howe.
My worry has ever been how much time we will waste on the way to getting it done.
I believe it will be done because at this point anything else is unthinkable.
The club itself has briefed too many of its pet journalists to publicise our interest.
If that interest wasn’t real not only would they not have done this, but they would actually have disavowed the stories, in their own interests.
Instead, they let them proliferate
. I have to think that even this board is not crazy enough to permit that if we’re not going to get this over the line.
Still, a number of issues arise from the way in which this has been done, and a couple of things are brought home to those of us whose job it is to chart the highways and byways of these matters.
The most obvious of them is this; aside from the mainstream press, and only a handful of them at that, there are no “in the knows” here. None.
When this club wants to keep something close-hold, it does it very well.
There have been no leaks from the dressing room.
There have been no leaks from the boardroom.
Aside from a handful of journalists with long-standing relationships with the club – and it doesn’t matter whether we agree with or like those relationships or not – nothing has gotten out.
For the last few weeks I’ve been urging caution every time one of these alleged “deadlines” has loomed.
Someone, somewhere, on the internet comes up with one, a lot of people jump onboard the bandwagon and our club ends up blamed for missing a window which never even existed in the first place.
When last Tuesday was supposed to be “the day” I said that I didn’t believe it because nothing had changed; sitting here a week later, it’s the same.
It might well be that something happens this week; indeed, I think this is the week in which we should roll out the director of football, just to demonstrate that there’s someone in the building at Celtic Park and that things are actually moving forward.
But do I expect it? No, because I don’t see what’s different this week than last week.
Even if we get to the weekend with nothing, a lot of folk are going to assume Howe will be named as soon as the final whistle blows.
That’s probably not going to happen either.
If we’re being realistic, the date which looms largest is Monday 31 May … it will be appalling if we are forced to wait another three weeks, but it’s the one date on which you can say, for sure, that the issues we’re told are what’s holding this up are resolved one way or the other.
Bournemouth will either be back in the EPL or stuck in the second tier and Howe will know if he’s got his people or if they are going to be unaffordable.
It’s not the only date to watch out for, but it’s the one where there are at least some good reasons for having one eye on the news services.
We will have a better idea on 17 May – a week from now – when Bournemouth play Brentford.
We could all be sitting that night hoping Ivan Toney has a massive game.
Imagine the irony of that?
If Brentford win we’re close.
If they get to the final by beating Bournemouth on 22 May in the second leg, we could possibly have our answer on Monday 24th.
That one, too, will be worth keeping an eye on depending on those games.
Until then I intend to ignore all these rumours and stories.
We’ll either get actual news before then or we won’t, but I’m not listening anymore to “word on the street.”
It’s proven to be wholly unreliable and it has caused numerous flare-ups when the announcements didn’t come.
We’re not going to bounce the club into a statement it’s not ready to make.
When we’re supposed to know we’ll know.
A lot of us will continue to be pissed off over the timing, but blaming Celtic for not hitting phantom deadlines dreamed up somewhere else … I think it’s high time that we all stop doing that.