You know what? I am going to enjoy Tuesday.
I really, really am.
More even than Tuesday, I am going to enjoy Wednesday.
I am going to enjoy reading a shell-shocked media wondering how our team managed to get a result against the Danes.
That, today, was awful. Not the game, which was just flat and uneventful, but the commentary on the game, a 90-minute torrent of negativity about Celtic, on our own club channel.
Chris Sutton’s awful defeatism and loser mentality was already on display in that rag The Record today; hearing him bang on about the same thing, whilst McLean lapped it up, was dire beyond belief.
Most disheartening was to hear John Hartson refer to the “26-point gap” and how will Celtic overcome it? Well, we’ll start with the fact that the “gap” was entirely artificial. The team that finished so far behind was also the team that smashed aside all opposition in the four years prior, to win every single domestic trophy they contested.
They didn’t go from being great players to being useless dreck overnight.
A few chucked it.
The rest were victims caught in the crossfire of awful management and the weirdest campaign in any of our memories. They also came up against an Ibrox team whose form was freakish, although aided and abetted by a season of Honest Mistakes.
I’ve said it already, anyone waiting for us to drop points in 16 games this coming season is in for the surprise of a lifetime.
The current squad – with no-adds – is good enough to beat our SPL opponents almost every week.
The gaps in the squad are slowly being filled.
One experienced central midfielder to replace Brown and we’re no worse off there than we were.
I’ll be interested in who the manager signs in that slot.
This week we’ve signed the left sided midfielder we’ve been screaming out for.
Our signing on the right can also play wide left. So for the first time, when Forrest is fit, we’ve got cover. We need a right back, but we’ve been linked with a dozen of them and we know that position will be filled.
We know it will, it’s not even up for debate.
Sign another central defender and we’ve brought in two and lost two.
Considering that one of the two we lost was a midfielder and the other was Shane Duffy you might even say we’ll come out ahead there and after Jullien is fit we definitely will.
I still think we’ll sign one more central defender just to make sure.
Up front, we badly need additional options, but Edouard hasn’t gone yet and our two attacking wide men should produce more goals for us, and so I’m fairly sure we’re on the right track, once the manager stops playing this outdated 4-2-3-1 system … which he will when he has his own players and we can see that this is already underway.
We will start the next campaign stronger than we finished the last one. I no longer have even the slightest doubt about that. Will it be enough? If the manager knows his business then yes it will be, and this squad will grow and develop and get better as time goes by. But even in the context of just the campaign ahead of us, I grow increasingly optimistic.
Tuesday might be too early, but I actually think we have a right good chance.
I think we’ve been lamentably lax in not getting business done much, much quicker and so there is some merit in what Sutton and other say about the club still looking too slow and even a bit flat-footed, but it’s pretty clear that a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes and little by little the plan is starting to emerge.
These players are also much, much better than they are being portrayed and perceived. Which is why I think we’re going to shock some folks in midweek, and at the same time we’re going to shut some of them up as well.