A Season That Scorched The Earth At Celtic And Left A Trail Of Bodies In Its Wake.

Like the end of a Shakespeare play, nothing now remains that was before.

In the starting line-up today were six players who will not pull on Celtic shirts again.

The coaching staff will leave under a cloud.

They were there replacing a manager who’s already been dispatched.

The CEO has fallen on his sword.

The entire football department has been gutted.

The curtain falls on a pile of bodies, as though someone had wheeled out all the dead of MacBeth and deposited them in front of us.

This season has been ghastly.

So where did it all go wrong? Could this have been avoided?

Were there moments along the way which could have changed the course and saved us from the depressing fate we’re facing up to today; a club rent asunder and having to built anew?

One thing is clear; it didn’t begin this season.

We’ve been in this malaise for a while now, and the signs of it were obvious two seasons before, and that’s where you have to start if you really want to take a proper look at where we are and how we got here.

This season’s events didn’t happen in a vacuum.

They are the result of years of neglect at various levels of the club, and a style at the top of the house which has bred disaster.

Everything about this mess could have been avoided, had we made the right decision in February of 2019.

The failure to do that will haunt us and all involved for a long time to come.

But the biggest failure by far was allowing Peter Lawwell to be CEO for 17 years.

He was already arrogant and hubristic and tended to think he knew more about football than he did, and his constant interference was costly, never more so than his role in making Brendan Rodgers walk out of Celtic Park in the abysmal manner that he did.

So in looking at this disaster, that’s where we have to begin.

Lawwell And Rodgers Clash … And The CEO Wins.

The day I knew we were in trouble was the one before the night of the AEK Athens game at Celtic Park. Brendan Rodgers laid into our board and their failures to get him players in a fashion that was certain to make all the wrong kinds of headlines.

His frustration had been growing all summer.

By that evening he must have known that on top of missing out on Schar, who had gone to Newcastle, and Castagne that he would also fail to get the one player every one of us would have bet on ending up at Celtic Park, John McGinn.

The pursuit of the Hibs man had been ongoing for months.

But Lawwell had failed.

Three failures out of three, all the manager’s top targets.

And that afternoon, sitting in front of the media, Brendan Rodgers had pretty much had enough. He let rip with his attack on the way negotiations were being conducted.

The following night, before the game kicked off, a “Celtic director” who I am 100% convinced was Peter Lawwell, spoke to Chris McLaughlin of the BBC and blasted back. The club was clearly in turmoil.

The following day I was at Celtic Park for a meeting and I left profoundly concerned because Lawwell had made it clear that the club felt it was right – which meant that he felt he was right – and that Rodgers was wrong.

I knew Brendan’s days were numbered.

At that point, I think it was probably too late to keep Rodgers at Parkhead.

Whatever had burst into the public domain had been simmering for a while, and I certainly believe that our CEO was partly to blame for it. He has a monstrous ego, and so does Rodgers, and only one of them was ever going to be allowed to prevail.

At some point Rodgers would certainly have gone to speak to Desmond and asked him to put a more professional face on transfer negotiations, or maybe even to remove Lawwell from a position of influence over the football department … if he did, we know whose side Desmond took.

He backed his CEO and that didn’t really leave Rodgers with a choice.

He had other targets identified for the January window; we signed Maryan Shved, who he had almost no knowledge of.

It was stark evidence, to him and to us, that other people were interfering in the area he considered his bailiwick, and that it wasn’t going to end. Less than a month later, Rodgers was gone, and the CEO was all-powerful again.

What a great decision giving him free reign turned out to be, right?

For many people, that’s where it started … and up to a point, they are right.

A Badly Flawed Signing Policy

This tracks back before then, of course, to something that was apparent from Lawwell’s earliest time at the club.

Our transfer strategy changed when he arrived and it first hit home during “the Wilo Flood window” when the CEO, so convinced of his own abilities as a great poker player, wouldn’t sanction the couple of hundred grand that would have got us Steven Fletcher from Hibs.

He once quipped that it’s the name that would be carved on his headstone; I told him, on the morning after the AEK home game that if things went tits up at Celtic as a result of that he’d never have to worry about hearing that name again.

Nevertheless, it haunts him and it should because that was the first time we all saw that Lawwell was egocentric enough to overplay his hand at our expense.

In the years that followed, Strachan, Lennon, Mowbray, Deila and Rodgers would all be baffled as signings were foisted on them that they clearly didn’t want. You can tell that by the number of games some of these signings started.

These were players someone else at the club fancied, and the managers never had a say in it at all.

And most of these players were, if we’re being honest, absolute duds.

Lawwell likes to give the impression that he masterminded the strategy in the last decade; funny that he never learned to trust the judgement of his managers more than his own.

Signings take forever. A lot of players are sold without the manager’s approval.

We stopped using the Bosman market somewhere along the line, and missed out on some quality.

Friends of the man were given jobs – such as Strachan’s other son – and we simply stopped aiming high.

We also missed out on some incredible top Scottish talent during this spell.

The days when our managers were forced to accept players they didn’t want – bloating the squad and the wage bill and removing resources managers could have used – are hopefully now at an end, but that depends on getting the structure of the club right this time.

The (Temporary) Hiring Of Neil Lennon

The temporary hiring of Neil Lennon was the moment the real slide started.

There can no doubt that it was the biggest contributory factor in what happened this season.

It was the moment our club basically stopped caring about standards.

My initial reaction to that appointment was anger, because it was immediately apparent that unless Lennon completely crashed the car he would have a chance of getting the gig permanently, which I was not in the slightest doubt would be a disaster.

Our board has always been perfectly capable of blowing ten in a row; I’ve known that since I found out we hired Ronny Deila after initially marking him down as Lennon’s assistant.

From that moment on I knew that we had people at Celtic Park who were nowhere near as smart as they think they are and nowhere near as ambitious for our club.

Lennon had just been sacked by Hibs after blowing up the dressing room in the manner he had at Bolton. I know, by now, some of the details of what went on at that club and if I know them then you had better believe that Celtic directors were similarly aware of them.

If they weren’t they only had to call Leeann Dempster.

Neil Lennon should not have been near Celtic Park, in spite of the justifications that he “understood the club” and other such tripe which was prevalent at the time and which convinced myself and many other sceptics that there was some merit in the idea.

Looking back it’s perfectly clear that there wasn’t.

I write that in the full knowledge that Lennon completed that campaign with the trophies and titles and that he won the next three as well. I think, though, that Rodgers had set such high standards across the club that it was a while before they fell but once they had they crash came rapidly.

Lennon’s hiring on the temporary basis let the club believe that we didn’t need to go out and find a top class Brendan replacement. His initial successes convinced them that they could continue to do things on the cheap, whilst the CEO pocketed a third of the money we got for our former boss and his management team.

They didn’t make the slightest effort to use it to replace him; they simply grabbed a guy who was available and there is no evidence they made the slightest effort to find a decent Rodgers replacement as that season wore on.

We could have sorted out our problems had we learned something from the manner in which Rodgers left; some people at the club could have snapped back into sanity and gotten a grip.

Had they put Kennedy – yes Kennedy – in temporary charge in February 2019 whilst they conducted an immediate search for a new manager – Cocu, Blanc and dozens of others were all available at the time, Clarke would have walked to Parkhead for the job even for six months and would have won us the lot – we would not be in this mess right now.

Instead we took a lazy, cheap option lacking in imagination and vision. Disastrous.

Ferencvaros: Before, During And After.

As with the ghastly night prior to the AEK Athens game, it is clear that there had been problems at Celtic for a while before the night of the Ferencvaros game.

I have never wavered from my belief that these problems were inexorably tied up with the manager.

When people are used to certain standards the very worst thing that can happen is that those standards are allowed to slip. We’d had a happy squad and an outwardly ambitious club.

Players had bought into that ambition, but from the moment Lennon was hired it was clear that it was leaving with the former manager. So of course people wanted to go.

You have to imagine that all through Lennon’s full season – where we did win the trophies we were aiming for – that things were unravelling behind the scenes. We know it’s when players started clamouring to be allowed to go.

We know it’s when Lennon started to lose control of the dressing room.

How bad were things? We had all heard stories.

The night of the Ferencvaros game, it was clear when the team was announced that things had taken a spectacular wrong turn when, in spite of having three strikers on the bench, Lennon went with Ryan Christie up front.

It was a scandalous decision, and one that certainly contributed to costing us the game. But the worst was to come, at full time.

In spite of inexplicable chatter from the management team about certain players not being fit – we were weeks into the season – there really hadn’t been any indication that the season was about to self-detonate; that night Lennon himself blew it up when he attacked his own players in the aftermath of the game, and said some of them didn’t want to be there.

Suddenly all our fears were given life and form; the rumours about dressing room splits, about the manager having lost the plot, stories about players lacking fitness and discipline because those above them hadn’t imposed standards on them, and our concerns that this was just the sort of thing that Lennon had done at Bolton and Hibs eventually.

It was all happening at Parkhead.

And we all knew that we were in trouble from that moment on. When a manager does this it’s not because he wants to get a reaction; it’s because he no longer expects one and just doesn’t care.

Worse was to follow; he then backtracked on the comments at the very next press conference and from then until he was sacked he more or less stuck with the players he had publicly accused of putting themselves before the club.

It was a suicide strategy, as almost every supporter watching it understood all too well.

We expected things to get worse.

It wasn’t even very long before they did.

From Sevco To Sparta  

For a lot of people, the turning point was the Celtic Park game against Sevco, where we didn’t register a single shot on target and deservedly lost.

It was one of the weakest, ineptest performances I’ve ever witnessed against a club from Ibrox, and I am counting some of the hammerings we took in the really, really bad years. Clearly, things had gone very bad.

I initially didn’t panic.

Because teams can have a bad day at the office, and although it was clearly a shocker and the signs of deep-seated problems behind the scenes I was prepared to ride out what might, after all, have been a mere bump in the road.

I had grave concerns by then; of course I did.

Even during the previous season there was a part of me that was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I hoped we could hold it together long enough to get through the league campaign.

But then we dropped points against straight afterwards and I lost a lot of my optimism and my happy thoughts.

Sparta at home was the night the blinkers came off for real.

That night I knew Lennon was leading us to an absolute car-crash of a season.

His tactics, his substitutions, his demeanour, his attitude in the aftermath of the game … they stank. It was perfectly obvious that we were in a tailspin and that he had no idea at all as to how to get us out of it.

That was the night I started wanting him sacked, for the good of the club, and I said so.

That night was unacceptable in every way.

Celtic should not have been losing so heavily, at home, to a team of that calibre and especially not one who had left most of their first team squad at home due to a mass outbreak of the virus in their ranks.

When Lennon battered the team in the aftermath of the game I wasn’t surprised; he wasn’t going to take a shred of personal responsibility, and his comments about how it wouldn’t happen again seemed almost an invitation to the Gods of Football to strike him down.

Of course, it did happen again and I was genuinely appalled when the board didn’t act that night and remove him immediately.

There was no longer the least doubt that the entire season was crashing down around our ears.

To leave Lennon in charge after the first Sparta defeat seemed incredible.

To have failed to sack him after the second – when our season could still have been saved – was unforgivable.

The Ross County Defeat And The First Fan Protests.

I think it’s probably beyond doubt that the Ross County debacle was the last real chance the board had to change the course of this campaign. From the moment they chose not to we were in freefall and I think all of us knew that it was over.

At that point it was painfully obvious that the players were not interested in saving the manager’s job. It actually struck me several times that he didn’t seem particularly interested in having it saved.

By then he had become almost totally disengaged from the reality of his situation although it was readily apparent that he ought to have already been fired.

The fan protests followed; to me it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t be removed the following day.

Instead, Desmond briefed the press that he we were “entitled” and that neither he nor the board would be swayed by the fans. No-one was asking him to; it was the results we wanted him to look at, the unacceptable results.

But Lennon didn’t get fired. The fences went up instead.

The insults towards the support were piled one top of the other.

The Friends of the Man – people like Strachan – come out to defend the regime.

I don’t suppose it mattered that two of his sons were working at Celtic Park and still are.

Friendly blogs started putting out the word that it was the wrong time to act “rashly.”

As if watching the mounting humiliations was something were supposed to handle with stoic silence.

The position had already disintegrated.

The season lay in ruins. We were behind in the league, out of one cup and had suffered disastrous and embarrassing results in Europe. Any board in the country, facing this, would have fired a manager … but ours didn’t.

And then they made matters worse.

The Board’s Dreadful Decision.

By the time the board made a statement to the fans most of our ambitions had already been crushed.

The dressing room had stopped playing for the manager.

The coaching staff had run out of ideas. The fans confidence in the management team had collapsed. The league race looked over. European football was gone. We’d been turfed out of one cup.

Every day in which we delayed merely made the scale of the damage worse.

It added further insult to injury.

The smart thing to do would have been to start looking for a new manager there and then; instead our board made a critical decision which was to have horrendous consequences, and we may not even have seen the worst of them yet.

They announced that the manager’s position would be reviewed in January.

Reading that, on the day they announced it, I knew they meant the end of January and not the start of it.

And I suspected that the whole idea was a despicable fraud which would result in a fudge retaining all involved until the end of the season.

The statement was a shocker, because it was readily apparent that there was no prospect of the management team recovering the position. What position was there to recover anyway?

We’d blown the title race and between that and the Scottish Cup it was all we had left. Lennon was by now looking and sounding like a guy who knew the gig was up.

Keeping him in place was disgraceful on so many levels.

Announcing that his fate would be decided a month hence meant that it would be the first question he was asked every week. Sacking him at that point would have been a mercy killing, for all of us.

It would have been different if we’d spent that time wisely sounding people out about the job; six months later, and three after the deed was finally done, we’ve still yet to appoint anybody.

It seemed incredible that the board would think holding off on a major decision like this whilst things continued to crumble was anything other than catastrophic.

But as it turns out, that’s exactly what they did think.

Within weeks, we’d lost again to the Ibrox club and fallen 19 points behind in the league.

We had games in hand, but the gig was up.

That sent us into the New Year on a real downer.

Dear God, if we’d known what was about to happen …

Dubai

There are almost no words which are adequate to describe how stupid was the decision to travel to Dubai, one of the virus hot-spots on the planet at that time, with over 40 employees of the club, at a momentous cost, when the directors were actively thumbing their noses at the fans and during a national lockdown after the Ibrox club had left us playing for the Scottish Cup.

Future generations of our supporters will look at that decision in incomprehension.

It betrayed a an unfathomable snow-blindness within the walls of Celtic Park, a total lack of understanding about how the club would look, or else a mind-bending arrogance more in line with what we expect across the city.

The fans were furious, and made that known.

The trip would have been a disaster on so many levels even if all involved had come back refreshed and healthy and raring to go.

Because the PR side of it was devastating to the club’s self-image, and the schism between it and the fans widened to become a chasm.

Nobody could believe it.

And we were just waiting for there to be consequences.

When Christopher Jullien tested positive that was bad enough; the news was made all the more ridiculous because the club had stated that the trip was about fitness and conditioning; yet he had made the trip on crutches, and wasn’t going to play again all season.

But the news that his positive test had forced 13 others, including Kennedy and Lennon and half of the team into self-isolation was the hammer blow it felt like we’d been waiting for.

The effects on the team were immediate, and horrific.

More dropped points. More embarassment.

It was symbolic of how the entire campaign had gone; hubris ruthlessly punished.

When Lawwell finally emerged to apologise to the fans and to the country it seemed as if we’d done something right.

Then, as soon as he was back in front of the press, Lennon went on a blazing, self-destructive rant against the media, the Scottish Government and others, retracting the apology the CEO had made and torching the PR repair job.

I think it was probably the moment some in the club marked him for termination.

John Kennedy: The Final Insult 

John Kennedy was the Final Insult. We knew he’d have to get the gig when Lennon went, but we’d spent so long being told that he was some kind of special talent I think even the most cynical of us was prepared to give him a chance to prove it.

Now let’s be clear; Kennedy never had a prayer of winning over the fans to get the job on a permanent basis, even if he’d worked miracles.

I’ve said before that I felt Lennon getting the job when that was so obviously not merited was what wrecked any chance Kennedy had of it, because it was clear that once Lennon blew it the next appointment couldn’t be another cheap option.

But Kennedy could have done himself some favours had he produced the goods and shown us something.

It’s fair to say though that the Kennedy Experiment has been an unmitigated disaster, with his having won just four games out of ten.

He tired no new tactics.

He kept “faith” with the players who had failed us the whole season.

His team meekly capitulated in the Scottish Cup at Ibrox.

Yet we’re being told that he might be retained in some capacity for the sake of “continuity” …

But nothing should remain from this campaign.

Kennedy should join the bodies piled up in the middle of the stage, he and his assistant Strachan.

With the curtain having fallen on this dismal campaign what everyone needs now is a fresh start … and that means him moving on and letting the next guy build things the way he wants them.

This season has ended, thank God … and all should end with it.