This Has Been A Quiet Week At Celtic. Next Week Certainly Won’t Be.

The last week at Celtic have been quiet, as it should be when the real chaos is unfolding elsewhere. Whoever gets the gig across the city, it will usher in a period of turmoil where there wasn’t any a week ago.

This is the advantage that we must press.

Celtic will not descend into turmoil this week. Instead the turmoil part of the club is already in will be confronted and those responsible for it made very aware that fans and shareholders alike recognise their role in what is still a shambles off the pitch.

We have a League Cup semi-final looming, and the players and the coaching staff will be focussed on that almost entirely.

Ange never pokes his nose into areas outside of his line of expertise and will easily dodge any questions that come up about what is said and done elsewhere, but it will not be so easy for the board to dodge their own.

For the first time in a long time, they should be coming under some real pressure. If they escape from it with an easy ride, then it will be a day of shame not for them but for those who attend the AGM and who are meant to subject them to scrutiny.

I have absolute faith that this year the shareholders will do exactly that.

There are already discussions going on in various forums about what should be asked.

Questions about financial fair play and refereeing reform will most definitely come up, and so will serious questions about how our club goes about the business of finding a new CEO.

The old pals act, and the handing out of massive jobs within our structure to the Friends Of The Man is simply not acceptable. The chief executive of a major football club is too big a job to be simply handed to some insider or yes man … have we learned nothing from the preposterous decision to give the manager’s job to Lennon?

A role like this needs to be advertised, or a proper search conducted for an outstanding candidate, and the best person available sought for it.

It is not a sweetie to be handed out to good wee boys and girls.

This board has to learn that it is accountable, that the supporters are not customers to be ignored but that we are also custodians of this club after our own fashion, and in fact more important that the board of directors will ever be.

They work for us … and they forget that.

It’s as Wallace says in Braveheart.

I sometimes believe they think we exist to provide them with position instead of recognising that their position exists to provide our club with the best platform for the future.

They are kidding themselves on if they think they are producing on that front. Our club is stuck in the mud.

Too many critical posts remain unfilled. Nicholson held a fan symposium to listen to their concerns, but the biggest concern of all is the one he has not even attempted to address, which is that the bulk of the fan-base does not have a clue who he is or what he stands for (except that he was pushing the Survival Lie at that meeting) or what his “vision” is.

And that is just not on at all. This guy is in hiding.

His failure to get in front of the media and subject himself to their questioning is pathetic.

It strongly suggests that this is someone with nothing to say, and whatever we might have thought about Lawwell he was a man who had plenty to say and who made his views on any number of things known.

We already have an absentee shareholder who somehow gets to make all the decisions and an invisible chairman. Now we are supposed to accept an invisible CEO as well?

When people look at the upper echelon of the club all we see is smoke and mirrors.

These people are not leaders.

Simply holding firm and hoping things turn out alright is not proper governance; their lack of skills in that area – losing their top managerial candidate and having to fire their new CEO within months of each other are damning – has been cruelly revealed and now that the true picture is clear to us there is no going back to the days when they seemed competent.

We all know that this board will be frozen in the headlights of a real crisis.

I would rather not wait for the next one to come.

There has to be a change at the very top of our house and that’s the process which this week to come will hopefully kick off, with a clear message from the floor at the AGM.

For a time, it will not seem to matter … every one of these board members will be re-elected and we know that already.

But – and this is the thing – they will from here on in know that their positions are secured only by insiders and that it does not translate into real support in the places that truly matter in the long term; the stands.