This article formed part of what I called The Guilty Men series.
It is a repost, so if it sometimes seems to have been written at the end of last season, that’s because it was.
Why am I posting it up today when it’s been up before? Easy. It’s because of the men on this list – the section about the players excluded – only one is no longer at Celtic, and that individual is Neil Lennon.
Every other one, including the first name on the list, is still here.
Last season saw the manager go, the CEO announced that he would, we all assumed that Kennedy was headed for the departure gate and a dozen players said farewell and left the club never to return.
It was a catastrophe, and we’re not out of the woods yet because we were so slow getting into the prep work for next season that a lot of time was squandered along the way. Incredibly, we then conspired to lose our new CEO in only 72 days.
For Celtic fans, things are still dire off the field, and all we can see in front of us at the moment is more uncertainty.
The people responsible for that are Lawwell, Desmond and Bankier.
All three are in the article that follows, but on different rungs of the ladder having had different levels of responsibility for the chaos we’ve seen unfold.
Only one of them has departed from his role at the club and some wonder how legitimate that is.
A lot of consider that the other two have to go to really bring this dreadful period to a close.
Those are fights for the future … but in the meantime we will recall their names.
All of their names. This is who they are. Read the roll of dishonour.
The Guilty Men At Celtic: Peter Lawwell.
“If I could only get my record clean, I’d be a genius.” – Warren Zevon.
There are still Peter Lawwell fans in our support, as absurd as that will sound to the enlightened amongst us, those capable of seeing the big picture. There are still people who think that he walks on water, that we’re strong and stable because of him.
I’ve always found it funny that none of these people ever wonder whether we could be stronger with someone else. Lawwell is not an exceptional administrator.
I’ve long argued that for the money we pay him we could have a chief executive from any number of other industries and got more bang for our bucks. He has always been overpaid.
But it’s worse that he is over-rated. Because I just don’t see it.
This is the guy who’s hired Neil Lennon twice, when he wasn’t qualified for the job either time.
He’s the guy who hired Tony Mowbray.
In his credit book, he hired Rodgers as well, although the suspicion has always been that it was Desmond who drove that process.
Lawwell also hired Ronny Deila.
Now you need to factor that in when you consider what this guy has really presided over.
Lennon twice, Ronny, Mowbray and Rodgers.
Five managerial appointments.
I would argue that he got four of them wrong; both the Lennon decisions, the Mowbray one and the decision to appoint the Norwegian.
He lucked out on two of them.
The first Lennon appointment would have ended in failure had Craig Whyte not pulled the plug on Rangers.
Lawwell can take no credit for what followed; indeed, he made sure that every Lennon success ended with the squad selling key players and the manager having to start from scratch again.
The Ronny appointment was the most fortuitous one in our recent history; by almost every standard you care to use that was an unforgivable decision. And I write that as one of the few people who argued for it at the time.
Of course, there were a few things of which I was entirely unaware when I did, and it’s only now, knowing them and seeing the full picture, that I recognise Ronny’s appointment for the dreadful decision that it was, and the disaster it might have been.
This makes the good fortune of it all the more incredible.
We had intended Ronny Deila to be Lennon’s number two.
It was only when Lennon decided to leave – and you wonder if he left rather than accept that – which led to us offering Deila the top job instead.
We didn’t start a new process when Lennon left; we simply gave it to the guy who had already had one foot in the door.
There was no attempt to get the best person … the most readily available person was what we went for instead.
That’s a shameful decision, not made any less so by the fact that Ronny brought with him all the right ideas and all the right changes which, although the players weren’t comfortable with them at the time were of huge importance to us when Brendan Rodgers took over. Ronny built the new culture of the team, the new standards, which Rodgers benefited from.
Of course, having got off with that, Lawwell then hired Lennon again … and effectively undone everything Rodgers and Deila had built. This is the kind of decision making for which some have hailed Lawwell as some kind of genius and hero.
The rest of Lawwell’s record is no better.
Commercial growth has been stagnant for years.
The sight of Ibrox’s commercial department stamping a sponsor’s logo on everything that can be flogged for one might seem like scrambling around in the dirt for dropped change, but it’s money our genius has somehow left lying on the table instead of putting it in our pockets when it could have paid for better coaches and scouts and even the improved contracts on some of the players we stand to lose.
He has colossally failed to represent us at the SFA and UEFA.
His alleged “all powerful” position in the former has brought us not one reform of note, which would have strengthened Scottish football as a whole and weakened Ibrox at the same time, and his supposed influence at the latter has brought us not one tangible benefit.
Even if you’re willing to ignore his constant interference in transfer issues, including his repeated failures to get major deals done, right up to his last window and the Davies embarrassment …
And even if you’re willing to overlook that no CEO should be in place for more than five years far less the 17 which this guy has been in post …
And even if you were willing to ignore our repeated tendency to leave ourselves grossly unprepared year on year for Europe …
Even if you overlook all that, this is the guy the Resolution 12 boys say was asked at an AGM if he’d seen the Five Way Agreement and basically lied about it.
Anyone still defending him after all that is kidding themselves on.
This is the man most directly responsible for costing us ten in a row and he is at Celtic Park and still on the board.
The Guilty Men At Celtic: Dermot Desmond.
“I ain’t moving ’till the baliff comes ….” – The Police.
Here’s the thing with being an absentee landlord;
If you aren’t watching everything then don’t be surprised to come back one day and find out that there are rottweilers shitting all over the garden, parties going on in the house, broken windows on every floor, a meth lab in the kitchen and that tramps have been living in the basement and pissed up the living room curtains. Only be surprised that you still have living room curtains in the first place.
Dermot Desmond likes it when he is promoted as the “decision maker” at Parkhead, but the truth is that he leaves too many of the decisions to other people, and to Lawwell in particular.
He has very little interest in the day-to-day running of the club, and that’s a problem because he’s filled it with spineless jellyfish who defer too much to the CEO.
So in Desmond’s absence, Lawwell made every critical decision and has been allowed to grow over-mighty to the point where he believes that he is the walking embodiment of Celtic itself.
You can only blame Lawwell up to a point; anyone with his job, and unlimited authority, and no oversight whatsoever, might start to believe in his own omnipotence.
The real fault for that lies with Desmond for allowing it and for not dealing with it when it became apparent that it had become a problem, and it became apparent long before this season began.
The way Rodgers was undermined by Lawwell should have been a major warning to Desmond that the CEO had started, again, to overstep the boundaries.
But Desmond did nothing about it, except call both men to a meeting to tell them to sort the thing out. But by then the relationship was poisoned and Rodgers knew that Lawwell wouldn’t pay a blind of heed to it.
He proved it when he signed Maryan Shved, blindsiding Rodgers entirely in the January window before he left for Leicester.
Desmond can take some of the blame for Rodgers’ departure. He should have backed the manager over Lawwell, but his lack of engagement with goings on at Parkhead rendered that impossible.
Desmond doesn’t really care about Celtic; we’re a vanity project for this guy.
He is so disconnected from the reality of the club that he, as well as Lawwell, thought Lennon a suitable appointment.
This is the guy who praised Rangers during the liquidation crisis, and said that our club needed them.
He never attends AGM’s. He goes to one game in maybe a dozen.
It’s not that he’s absent as much as that he likes the idea of Celtic but not the reality of it. For that he leaves Lawwell in charge, and that has been disastrous. He says he wants to leave his shareholding to his kids.
They may or may not getting involved in stuff.
I actually don’t know what would be worse; that they might want to or that they might treat the club the way he does.
Desmond is number two on the list of who is to blame for last season, and we still have no idea what happened to Dominic McKay, but we suspect that he had something to do with it. Indeed, we know he did.
His own arrogance is encapsulated in the media leak that he would hold onto Lennon to spite us; no-one who genuinely cared about our club or its reputation would have done that.
No-one who shared the hopes and dreams of the support would have reacted in such a petty and plainly destructive fashion.
That shows his level of commitment; to harm us out of vindictiveness.
As far as I’m concerned the man is a disgrace and his legacy has been toxified.
Even a good decision on the next manager will not aid in its recovery.
It’s poisoned.
Not to worry though; he has the eternal gratitude of the Ibrox board.
He has made them look professional, and they are certainly more committed to their club than he is to ours.
If that doesn’t fill him with deep shame nothing will.
The Guilty Men At Celtic: Neil Lennon.
“You learn to sleep at night with the price you pay …” – Bruce Springsteen.
For some people, Neil Lennon would have been at the top of the list of the guilty, but I cannot in good conscious put him there.
He’s third because the two men above him on the list didn’t even attempt to replace Rodgers with a manager of quality.
They picked their pal. Their yes man.
They then watched as their ghastly decision backfired and failed to act as the season unravelled.
In doing so, they cost us ten in a row.
I think they’ve also killed Neil Lennon’s managerial career.
Lennon should not have been given the Celtic job on a permanent basis.
You can make the argument that his initial hiring – on the temporary basis – was a smart bit of business, but the decision to give him the permanent gig was a travesty and it was destined to end in disaster from the moment it was confirmed in the Hampden shower.
The reasons why Lennon was a bad appointment are so many in number that it’s hard to know where to start; let’s, however, strip away those which are not the manager’s fault.
Neil Lennon cannot be blamed because he is not a good tactician. He never has been.
He cannot be blamed because he is a one note boss who thinks a rousing speech or a verbal volley is the way to make players do what you want.
These failings were known to everyone at the club.
They were not a surprise.
The two men above him on this list of the guilty hired him knowing about those limitations and faults.
They could have plugged the gaps in his knowledge by hiring coaches who had those greater skills, but they left Lennon with equally limited men in those positions as well, and so the blame for his failures partly belongs to those men and they cannot escape from that.
But Lennon could have grown as a manager and learned.
He could have changed his working habits and developed into the role.
He could have used the analytics teams and re-watched games to see what had gone wrong in them.
He could have changed up the team.
He could have fought for the players he wanted and needed instead of accepting what the board gave him.
Lennon could have held his tongue that night after Ferencvaros instead of publicly lashing his team which certainly made matters worse and cost him the respect and support of the dressing room – a suicidally stupid move which you knew the moment he did it was going to cost us a lot, and eventually cost him a lot more.
He could have taken some personal responsibility as the mistakes piled up and one error compounded another instead of continuing to lash his own players, which only ensured that the resentments and angers burned until his removal.
There are mistakes which Lennon owns.
Whilst his tactical failings were known before his arrival there were some of them that were jaw-dropping, such as the decision not to field a striker against the Hungarians, and his failures to read the game-plan against Slavia at Celtic Park.
Everyone in my living room saw what they were doing when they made the changes that led to goals number three and four that night;
Lennon still hadn’t read them a fortnight later when the same tactics saw us get routed in Prague by the same score line.
What came across most about Lennon, as the ship went down, was his selfish determination to take no responsibility at all for the state the team was in.
He had driven wedges between himself and the squad and he even had one or two pops at the fans.
If it were possible for a manager to be responsible for his own appointment – Craig Levein sort of half managed it – and Neil Lennon had done so, he would be far and away the biggest reason for the utter failure that was this campaign.
But the men above him not only hired him, but were completely unwilling to admit their own mistake and let him stay in the post for far longer than they ever should have.
Lennon is why our season blew up.
But they stuck by him even when the whole of Scottish football knew he’d shot it because they, like Lennon are selfish men.
That does not give him an alibi. He is the third of the guilty men, and had those men acted faster he would have finished above them.
His hiring was a disaster. His handling of the job was catastrophic.
I believe it might well be his last job in the dugout, and if that’s the case I am sorry for him.
But I’m sorrier for every fan who bought a season ticket, every fan who had to sit in front of the telly and watch his lamentable efforts to manage this team and for every fan who dreamed of ten in a row and had it snatched from them by his amateurish tactics and dreadful decision making.
The Guilty Men At Celtic: The Players
“We said we’d all go down together …” – Billy Joel.
In making my list of the Guilty at Celtic, I’ve gone through Lawwell, Desmond and Lennon.
There is no question that each of them carries a huge share of the responsibility.
But so too do the players, and they cannot – they must not – be allowed to think they will escape an historic judgement over this because some of them deserve to be slated for it.
There are some in this team who were part of the greatest run of success in the recent history of the club. They should have been remembered for that. They made so much history. They won so many honours.
They were supposed to grab the next rung on the ladder, and pull themselves up and into immortality.
They didn’t do it.
The club at Ibrox has had first rate form in this league season.
Some of that is down to us failing to put them under pressure, but even so it’s been impressive.
Had we simply lost to a team which set its own standards, that would be one thing, something we could live with.
There wouldn’t have been this inquest and all this anger.
There wouldn’t have been so many recriminations.
But we watched a team that chucked it.
A team filled with players who had one eye on the exit door.
A team which opted to lie down and die rather than stand up and fight.
They went down meekly, like cowards and non-triers.
We, the fans, didn’t deserve that.
These people forgot, lost in their petty self-indulgences, that they carried the hopes of all of us.
What they did was heaped humiliation on the support. That’s the disgrace here.
That’s where their attitudes and lack of concern for their own reputations becomes truly offensive.
They are fully entitled to shred their own records out of whatever pique or frustration was eating at them, but they had no right to trash our dreams whilst they were at it.
They owed us professionalism at the very least and commitment if they were feeling generous. They gave us neither and I got so sick of hearing them promise to do better and swear they would turn it around only to turn in the most insipid displays.
They got paid, so how many of them really cared about us?
At lot of them showed us how little they even thought about those outside their own bubble. I’ve heard for years that players don’t play for fans but themselves and each other; this is the most blatant evidence of that I’ve ever seen in a Celtic side.
Immortality was there for the taken, they’ve opted for infamy instead; so be it.
But they better realise what it means.
Some of them, I didn’t want to darken the doorstep of Celtic Park ever again.
I know some of them are hurting, like Callum McGregor, but some of them won’t even give us a backward glance as they head for pastures new, and we’ll keep it in mind.
We know who the truly guilty amongst the collective were, but this is a team game and it’s clear that many of them betrayed that principle as well. No matter.
You either succeed as one unit or you fail as one unit, there is no middle ground for teams who are half in and half out.
To be disunited, to be a house divided, is to fail … and their inability to sort their shit out and come together and fight as part of a single entity is the worst failure of all.
They should be ashamed of themselves and their performances in that campaign.
Every time they look at their medals they will all be haunted by the knowledge that one more would have made the set and they couldn’t’ get themselves up for it.
What a disgraceful way for them to finish what should have been a march to triumph.
The Guilty Men At Celtic: John Kennedy.
“It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall …” – Bob Dylan.
Of all the things that have come out of that campaign, one of the least surprising has been the bursting of the John Kennedy hype bubble.
For years we’ve heard how highly rated he is inside Celtic Park in spite of none of us knowing exactly why.
We assumed he was Lawwell’s placeman.
We have seen nothing in the last few weeks to change that view.
Let’s be honest here; John Kennedy is a very nice guy and he handles the press deftly and well.
Sadly those things do not make him a top class coach or football boss.
It doesn’t help either that he’s been lumbered with a colleague who appears to have been brought to Celtic Park on account of his second name. Time will tell if the new boss retains either man.
Kennedy was furnished with a great opportunity by Celtic.
When Lennon departed there were enough games still to play – including a Scottish Cup run to complete – which could have made Kennedy a genuine “one to watch” at another club.
He never stood a chance of landing the permanent gig at Parkhead because the fans wouldn’t have worn it, but he could have solidified his reputation in the eyes of people elsewhere and he hasn’t.
He has led the coaching team that for months beyond counting couldn’t get our players fit.
Whatever happens on the training pitch, he appears not to have done significant work on positioning because we still lose dreadful goals from set plays.
Kennedy is an example of the raging mediocrity we’ve allowed to dominate the football department.
This year has been a disastrous shattering of the illusion that he is more than a middling option.
As good a man as he might be, we cannot carry anyone as we go forward.
We cannot afford passengers or friends of the man … we have to start getting real here.
Middling options will not do.
Kennedy is part of the problem and as such there is no way that he can possibly be part of the solution.
Yet he remains.
The Guilty Men At Celtic: Ian Bankier
“I’m the invisible man. Incredible how you can see right through me …” – Queen.
You know why Ian Bankier finishes last on the Guilt List?
Because Ian Bankier, although chairman of our club, is so anonymous and disengaged from the reality of day-to-day life at Celtic Park that I only included him as a courtesy. He is utterly irrelevant.
There are a lot of euphemisms which come to mind when we think of Ian Bankier, most of them in relation to how useless he is. But nothing is more damning than the sure and certain knowledge that none of them come close to summing him up.
Whenever Celtic is being talked about in terms of the projection of power or who makes the decisions two names come up over and over again; Desmond and Lawwell.
Nobody considers Bankier a force to be reckoned with.
The media barely mentions him at all.
The last two Celtic chairmen have been forceful, powerful men used to dominating every conversation and room.
Brian Quinn was a member of the IMF and the deputy governor of the Bank of England.
John Reid was a former cabinet minister.
These men were not afraid to be in the news; indeed, Reid was rarely out of it and I reckon he was a huge and influential part of our club’s confident and aggressive posture between the time he was appointed and the time he left.
I regret his departure in October 2011.
With hindsight it was disastrous.
I think his position on the status of Rangers might have been worth hearing.
Bankier does not inspire confidence or fear or awe in the way men of this stature do.
With respect to his accomplishments in his own field, he’s a whiskey salesman.
He’s not a leader of men, and that’s what the job requires especially in the shadow of men like Lawwell and Desmond.
Reid was not afraid to step out of that shadow. Bankier lives in it.
He is here because you cannot mention this crisis with apportioning some of the blame at the man who runs the club, even if he’s a total nonentity.
Indeed, it is his lack of charisma, his lack of a public profile of any sort and the obvious way he defers to the “judgement” of the largest shareholder and the CEO that makes his especially culpable even if he took not one single decision of note during the course of this thing.
Because that’s what damns him.