It’s Time We Stopped Accusing Celtic’s Board Of Selling The Manager Short.

The Celtic board is guilty of many things, but I do not accept that leaving this squad undermanned or “threadbare” as Kris Commons has ludicrously suggested is one of them.

We signed 12 players in the summer window.

We spent big bucks.

The board pushed the boat out even on the final day to bring in the defensive reinforcement we required.

Ange has been backed. He continues to be.

We have at least three players arriving in December and they will be arriving almost the moment the window opens. The business will be done quickly, and that will put us in the best position we’ve been in for years.

This narrative that the board short-changed him in the summer has been flatly contradicted by the man himself. He says that 12 signings were enough, that in fact it might have been too many players to bring in at one time. By the time the season ends we will have replaced the guts of the first team. That is no joke. I thought it would take us two years.

If we lose this league title it will not be because the manager wasn’t given the tools. It’s that he was given some of them late in the day.

It will be because we dithered and delayed and lost months we didn’t have.

But once he was in the club supported him with the money. He has been given a free hand, such a free hand that the club ditched the idea of appointing a director of football to babysit him.

Ange runs the show; of that there is no doubt.

There is no doubt that Celtic has a title win capable team.

Once you conclude that you cannot do other than to conclude that everyone involved would deserve great credit for building it. If your argument is that the club has to stay injury free in order to win the league, then that’s true of every club in football.

None of them could easily cope with an injury list the size of ours, and it’s not unique to this moment, to this manager or to this time and place.

How often, last season and the year before, did you hear of how much trouble we were in if Edouard got injured? At one point two years ago the defence was down to the bare bones.

We promoted a kid from the reserves as cover. He’s still in the team today.

This board is ignorant, out of touch and arrogant beyond belief.

But they knew that they had to support the manager in the summer because otherwise the fans would have been in full-on revolt.

They did what they had to.

They know they have to back him in January because if they don’t and we don’t win the title that’s where people will put the blame.

If Celtic do lose this title because we drop points on this run it will not be because the board didn’t give Ange what he needed; it will be a combination of factors including mistakes that can be laid at Ange’s own door, and because we’ve had more reversals on the injury front than any of us thought was possible.

That is nobody’s fault. That is just football.

Commons’ view of this is typically simple-minded and one dimensional.

His talk about the “strength” of the Ibrox squad is ridiculous when one considers that they play the same basic team every week with only a few changes in the defence … they haven’t experienced a proper injury crisis yet, and we’ll be there waiting to pounce if they do.

Until then we just have to keep on winning.

As long as we do that these clowns have no story to tell, no narrative that will stick. They’ve been trying to pin this one to our board for the whole of the season so far, and it’s not supported by the evidence.