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Whatever Broke The Howe Deal, Celtic Are Responsible For The Mess We’re In.

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Two days on from the scandalous events which have rocked all of us to the core, the blame game is underway and accusations and counter accusations are being thrown about with abandon. Celtic sources are leaking all manner of stuff to the press. Certain websites are being briefed by their own sources and everyone’s acting like any of it matters.

There are a lot of people who think the truth will out, and that it has to. I think the best we can hope for is a sanitised version of it, some well-spun story that falls into general acceptance and might not bear any relationship to the actual events.

But I don’t really care which version that is, because in no version has Celtic acted wholly professionally. In no version has our club done everything it should have to protect itself and its reputation and in no version has the club not made colossal mistakes.

We are where we are today because the same issues, whether through arrogance, misjudgement, incompetence or unprofessionalism recur again and again and again and we seem no more capable of learning from them than our defence did at stopping set pieces costing us during the campaign.

Too many people have been at Parkhead for too long and they are out of ideas.

They don’t have any long term vision, and you only look at the scale of the mess we’re in to see that strategic thinking is an utterly alien concept to them.

They also have a worrying penchant for only looking at evidence that suits the decisions they are leaning towards in the first place.

We hired a consultancy firm to find us a director of football, many months ago. Are we to believe that their global search led them to Manchester City and a pal of Peter Lawwell’s kid? What a coincidence that is. We conducted a global search for a manager. Which somehow has led to someone recommended by Fergal Harkin, the aforementioned director of football candidate. What a coincidence that is as well. If you believe in coincidences.

It was immensely important that they got this decision right, and I wholly understand why there are club sources blaming everything from the fire at Lawwell’s house to Eddie Howe’s people holding out for a move to England, but none of that would have been an issue for us had we done the job right, right at the start, and got a signature on a piece of paper.

The spin is absolutely desperate.

Time was the one thing we didn’t have to waste here, and they have squandered months of it, and that we’ve ended up on the brink of a third rate appointment that has someone made the Lennon decision look sensible shames every one of them.

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