The mystery of last season deepens then, and you all know my thoughts on it.
An incredible confluence of events, unlike anything we’ve seen in Scottish football before, came together and gave the club across the city a shot in the arm and this coincided with a disgraceful collapse in standards at Celtic Park.
Their league form is inexplicable. Whatever drove it no longer applies.
Looking at their record, their march to the title poses a lot of questions which nobody seems to want to answer. The truth is, that squad of theirs just isn’t all that good.
Too many players in it are one note footballers.
Ultimately, they are a triumph of hype over achievement. If you accept – as seems clear – that their title win was achieved by something more akin to black magic than the fusing together of good footballers to make a truly good side, then a harsh verdict has to be returned on not only the squad but the nine years in which that club has existed at all.
In the course of their short history, Sevco has spent more than £100 million on the assembling of a team which has one major honour.
That is a colossal waste of money.
If you had given Derek McInnes that kind of cash he would have achieved more with it than successive Ibrox bosses have managed to. The history books will record that they stopped ten in a row, but that makes their single league triumph about us and not about them.
Has this era of theirs been a success?
No, it’s been a massive, expensive collective failure of enormous proportions and this squad of theirs has been one of the most spectacularly underachieving teams in the history of Scottish football.
Their fans are not oblivious to that fact. They understand that too many of their current crop simply cannot be trusted on the big occasion. Goldson, Tavernier, Kamara, Kent, Hagi, Aribo, Morelos … these guys are not the foundation stones of future success and nor are they bankable assets of the sort that the media would have you believe.
They have a squad full of footballers on big salaries who aren’t going to take them forward and who they couldn’t afford to keep even if they were.
But they can’t move these guys on either without getting real on the transfer fees … and they need to get transfer fees to have any chance of rebuilding the squad. We couldn’t have rebuilt ours without the sales of Edouard and Ajer.
To give their new boss a fighting chance, they need to find big money from somewhere and every player they bring in has to be better than what they manage to ship out.
What a nightmarish task they are facing. It is easily the equal of the summer rebuilding job we’ve just undertaken, but without any guarantee that the funds to do it will be available to them. If we win this title – and the chances are good – they face an incredibly tough summer. We know what that’s like, but there was a rainbow on the other side of ours.
An impoverished club, steeped in failure, its morale shattered and its fans in revolt and facing a strengthened Celtic with Champions League cash in the bank ….
Well that’s a hole they might not climb out of for years.
We have a foot on their throat. We only need to press down on it.
Your totally correct the media have been praising these players saying that they are worth 40,50 million. But what have they done? They won a league title nothing else. If they are worth so much what are the St Johnstone players worth? They are more successful than The rangers
I’d say their rebuild is a bigger job than ours as at least we had a selection of decent players (who just didn’t want to play for Lennon) and even with the pandemic happening we could afford to buy players. They have a squad who, if James is correct, are suffering from a severe caffeine come-down and were never worth half the value reported by the hacks of the SMSM! Also, going by Goldson’s post-match comments, they’ve a lot more players eyeing the door than we did.
Hell mend them all
Hh
We are in a great position to push on from our from our spontaneous combustion at Celtic last year. We had, at least, a better foundation than them to build on this season, and Ange has not only engineered a great escape but he has brought some badly needed unity to the club. Its a far better position than they now find themselves in and the grass I’m sure is going to be greener. That spineless coward Gerrard’s advisors got him out asafp as the writing was there for all to see, he had sold what little family jewels they had leaving the patsy GvB to face the capitulation. Spineless coward. HH
That 100,000,000 might be the reason their self generated valuation of their players is set at the same figure. A ridiculous figure worthy of only the trumpiest criminal asset boosting sheisters. Asset boosting is tax fraud. If these figures have been used for any type of fund generating then, ie share issues then there is a criminal case to be sought. HH
I agree with you James, Sevco need to find their next intake by selling “assets”. That’s the reality of the situation they are in. However, I heard GVB’s interview earlier and he has bee told that there’s no need to sell players in January. WTF Andy are they on. If there is cash for player intake and no exits then they are seriously going for broke, quite literally,. I suppy it’s the deflection tactic due to the loss to Hibs, (well done by the way), and come the window the truth will be something completely different. Anyway not our problem, our problem is a final against a decent foe. A foe that we know can provide a proper challenge on any one off game.