Once Again, Success At Celtic Inspires Ex-Ibrox Players To Think Their Club Can Copy Us.
Soccer Football - Scottish Premiership - Celtic v Motherwell - Celtic Park, Glasgow, Scotland, Britain - May 14, 2022 Celtic's Joe Hart celebrate winning the Scottish Premiership with the trophy Action Images via Reuters/Molly Darlington
The Gordon Brown premiership was notable for the utter failure that it was.
For years, he agitated to become the successor to Tony Blair.
He schemed and plotted. He undermined. He opposed numerous policies. He torpedoed Blair’s dream of taking us fully into Europe when he commandeered controlled of the decision to reject joining the Euro.
Yet when Brown got to Downing Street it became blindingly obvious that he didn’t really arrive with a plan for the country.
In many ways that’s like Boris Johnson right now. Brown was an honest and decent man, whereas Johnson is a born barefaced liar … but the two have one thing in common.
They massively underestimated the job of being Prime Minister.
Johnson underestimated it because he thinks he can do anything, but actually hates being bogged down in work. Brown’s underestimation, and that of his team, was of a different sort entirely. Such was their arrogance, they looked at Blair and his staff and the way they performed, and Brown told his own people “if they can do it, so can we.”
There is an obvious contempt at the root of that sentiment. And when you look at the coverage of Brian Laudrup’s comments in the paper this morning, talking about Celtic’s “chaos” last summer you can feel that radiating off the page at you.
Ibrox does look at Celtic Park and often thinks “if they can do it so can we.”
It’s in everything that happens over there. They look at our multi-million strip deals and believe that they are entitled to the same.
Not that they can get what we do, but that they are entitled to.
Part of it is tied up in their “Old Firm” fantasy. They think that just the idea that they are in some way our equal, or partner, in that disregarded enterprise gives them a leg-up and it does not matter how little our club shows interest in that.
One of the best things we ever did, and a decisive move away from them, was to cease any form of joint negotiations over sponsorship or kit deals … that hamstrung them.
They look, too, at our transfer policies.
Just because we’ve been able to realise high valuations for our top players, they presume that they can simply do what they watch us doing, even if, like Brown’s team, they don’t quite understand the skill involved or the fundamentals of doing so.
They look at the Kieran Tierney deal and think “we have a left-back, he has to be worth the same …” without any consideration as to whether talent has anything to do with it.
This whole thing about last summer and how we managed to do it is just another version of the same arrogant presumption.
But we had two massive advantages they don’t have; we got something like value for the players we shipped out and we had a manager with an exceptional knowledge of the game in the far East … and a philosophy, coupled with total control over the plan. The manager was the right fit and he had money to spend.
They make everything sound so simple over there, don’t they?
“Oh look, Celtic did it … we’ll just copy them.”
It’s as if it hasn’t dawned on them that maybe it’s not as easy as it looks.
It’s only when you’re actually attempting them – as Brown finally did – that you realise that there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Bloody blinkered idiots.
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