The Hacks Cling To A New Celtic Fantasy: That This Year Teams Will Be “Ready” For Us.
Soccer Football - Scottish Premiership - Celtic v St Johnstone - Celtic Park, Glasgow, Scotland, Britain - April 9, 2022 Celtic manager Ange Postecoglou celebrates after the match REUTERS/Russell Cheyne
This morning, Keith Jackson turned in a typical Keith Jackson piece, full of allusions to Celtic’s impending collapse. The idea behind this belief is that Ange somehow took the rest of Scottish football by surprise last season by being a good manager. Now that clubs know that he is a good manager he will not find it as easy.
This is the most ridiculous theory yet, one that is pitiful.
One that truly finds the bottom of the barrel and scrapes the goo off it. That a journalist at a national title wrote that, and not some forum posting numpty, is an indictment on the outlet which pays him.
And yet, Jackson is not alone in holding this view. I’ve seen other hacks express it.
I’ve also written about how some of them have taken to suggesting that a manager’s second season is always harder than the first; this is, as I’ve pointed out, is a theory from television, not from sport, based on the belief that when a first series is successful that the writers are tempted simply to try to tell the same story in a slightly different way, with no real originality.
In football, that’s called bedding in your ideas. It usually results in a team that gets stronger the longer it plays together. This notion that the following up a successful campaign is harder than putting one together is never, you’ll notice, applied at Ibrox; there are people now saying that the team did so well last season they might not need signings.
The truth is, we know that Ange’s team will be even more formidable when the new campaign kicks off. With a summer of peace and calm, in which to get his ideas across, and the players raring to go from the first weekend of the season, the hacks should be a lot more afraid of this team and this manager than they appear to be.
Maybe that’s it though.
Maybe this is all designed to give off the impression of calm, whilst they panic in private.
For sure, I know that anyone who looked at our form after our early bad spell cannot be unimpressed or concerned that there might be no stopping us.
None of them expected Jota and Carter Vickers both to sign; they may say that we’ve not actually gotten much stronger, but they all know losing those guys would have made us much weaker and they had hoped for that, only to have their hopes dashed.
This window isn’t closed yet. My money is on this team being much stronger when it finally is, and this would be enough to make me very confident even without knowing what sort of state they were in across the city.
Jackson and others can cling to this “tricky second season” theory, this insulting idea that Ange was only successful because people underestimated him (they apparently don’t realise how much that idea underestimates him) as they will … but they are simply setting themselves up for major disappointment and embarrassment.
It is not going to be like that at all.
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