Celtic Have The Big Club Swagger Again As We Make January Signing Number Five.

This is how strong clubs act. In a close title race they bring their full resources and power to bear and go for gold.

This is the sort of winter window we’ve lacked for years, and I grant you that it’s possible one of the reasons is that we weren’t in a close race … but I’ve seen close races where we’ve failed at this stage, the Wilo Flood window the worst by far.

And of course, last season, with the board “reviewing” Lennon’s position they famously gave him not extra penny to spend after backing him in the summer only for his signings to fail to deliver.

That was as clear a sign as any that change was coming and that the club had an eye on the summer. Which of course saw us back the manager with twelve players.

This window has been brilliant, and let’s not even pretend otherwise.

I don’t imagine we’ll sign anyone else, although a loony ex-player is screaming for us to sign a central defender when we have five of them, if you include Bitton, competing for two spots at the moment.

If the window closed right now I think we’d all be more than happy with the business done. Four first team ready footballers have arrived along with a promising academy prospect. If there are more, that will obviously be amazing, but I think we’d all profess ourselves to be pretty pleased with what we’re seeing at the moment from Celtic.

As Anthony Dunn, of the Endless Celts podcast, said to me when the news broke about this latest deal being done, we have that “big club mentality and swagger” again, and he’s right.

Because this is what big clubs do when the crunch comes.

We will emerge from this window vastly better placed for the remainder of this title race than we went into it … and of course, we’re already two points better off than we were before the new players arrived.

The way we’ve gone about all this – with a speed, efficiency and a ruthlessness that the fans haven’t seen in a long, long time – is perhaps just as promising as the signings themselves and a sign that things at Parkhead are working better than they have in quite some time … and for that, credit must go not only to Ange, who is clearly at the centre of this whole process, but to all who are involved including Michael Nicholson, who appears to be doing just fine.

There are still major questions about him – he hasn’t said a word to us all to articulate his plans for a start, and being Celtic CEO does involve being a lot more front and centre – but he has answered some of the big ones in recent weeks, first with how the club handled the winter break issue and now with the players we’ve brought in and the manner we’ve gone about it.

Even the setback of losing the Aussie boy to Middlesbrough has been deftly put aside and Plan B put into action and the signing secured without fuss or any of the shilly-shallying which characterised far too much of the Lawwell era.

It does in fact seem like a new era at the club.

And if that’s true, then all of Scottish football had better watch out. Because Celtic has rediscovered its sense of purpose, and that is bad news for all who would call themselves our rivals.