Warren Zevon’s Finishing Touches opens with the lines “I’m getting tired of you, you’re getting tired of me, and it’s the final act of our little tragedy.”
That about sums it up although the later lines “thanks anyway, no use hanging around” fit better.
Today was the doing at Ibrox I’ve feared all season long.
Because the ineptitude at every level at Celtic Park this season has been frightening.
The players who won everything in their path chucked it many weeks, if not months, ago and this is the shameful way that this squad breaks up; surrendering, meekly, on the end of a serious beating that could have been worse.
In many ways, I wish it had been because the lethargy and the lack of application and the sheer length of time it takes our club to do anything was perfectly encapsulated by that display and I fear that even now it will not shake the place to its foundations as it should.
It’s as if the attitudes in the boardroom and on the pitch have now merged to create one unfolding shambles where we’re too slow, too slack, unprepared, demotivated, running on empty.
Rumours buzz about a series of announcements in the coming week; our club is going to have work damn hard, a lot harder than it is working right now, and damned well, a lot better than in has in the last couple of years, if we’re going to recover in time to mount a challenge next season far less grab back the brass ring.
The sheer scale of this still hasn’t sunk in for some people yet.
There are people at Celtic Park who still have defenders when it is perfectly clear that they should have been run out of town on a rail.
If this was any other business in Desmond’s empire heads would have rolled already; we wouldn’t have seen the managerial situation dragged out until February when it was way too late and Lawwell wouldn’t be getting another two months to leech off of us pretending that he has answers to the problems he created.
That man has claimed the credit for every success we’ve secured, even those which we secured in spite of him. It is scandalous that he has not departed already, and owned up to his role in this disgrace.
I wholeheartedly believe he is the reason we’re in this mess.
I know he believes that such criticism is unwarranted; his Warren Zevon song of choice is clearly Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me, the anthem of the hard-done by. To me, the lyrics that sum him up best are from one of Warren’s finest songs; “If I could only get my record clean, I’d be a genius.”
The thing is, after the surrender of all three of our trophies and the humiliation of this league season, Lawwell will never get his record clean. This is how he’ll be remembered.
And this is how the team will be remembered in a lot of ways, not for the way they built their reputations as winners and champions but for the shocking way they lost them.
They went down without a fight.
These are their ratings after that shameful display.