Keevins Dredges Up Celtic’s “Biscuit Tin” Past And Shows How Ignorant He Really Is.
Today Hugh Keevins drank a farewell toast to Celtic’s “biscuit tin” days.
Nothing better sums up his colossal witlessness.
He was trying to be nice to us, for once, but that he resorted to that ancient standby, that media invention, and betrayed once more how scandalously ignorant he is should not surprise us for a second.
It is time that we nixed this once and for all.
It’s time we got to the bottom of what he and others in the media mean when they used that phrase.
You know, most of the Celtic fans I know have come a long way on this issue. The phrase was a media invention, from the 1980’s and 1990’s when the perception was that Celtic simply didn’t want to spend money, and so we would penny-pinch.
And it was a lie and our fans now realise what a lie it was.
Penny pinching wasn’t the issue at all. It never was that Celtic didn’t want to spend, that we threw the manager crumbs.
Back when this term was first in use, Murray was throwing money about like a man with six arms. We were in no position to match that or even to attempt it, and what’s more we now know that Murray and his club weren’t either.
Celtic has been run rationally.
That is our crime in the eyes of the sports media. It is as fake as the Tories lies about the so-called “winter of discontent” and has lasted just as long, even though our supporters now recognise that it’s why we’re now strong.
It offends me to the core that we are still not given credit for being sane and rational and refusing to endanger ourselves in the way Murray once did.
There never was a “biscuit tin” mentality at Celtic, just varying degrees of caution and fiscal discipline.
At times it has seemed to hold us back, but even as we were not getting deals done for the likes of John McGinn, the underlying truth was that we were strong and stable and winning things.
It was a season, in fact, where we gave the manager more money than we should have, and refused to part company with a single key player, even as COVID raged, that we failed to win a trophy.
That was two years back.
Last season, we spent a small fortune building a team but ended up with a transfer trading surplus; this year we’ve spent, but even if we reach £20 million in total outgoings, that’s exactly half of the minimum figure we’ll coin in from the Champions League.
Not even Keevins is stupid enough to think that represents a “biscuit tin mentality” but that he would even use the term to describe the policies that got us here in the first place, that laid the foundations for the modern club which towers above every other in Scotland, sane, rational and rich, is pathetic and shows how little he understands or wants to.
All these years we’ve eaten shit over being smart and sensible.
All these years we’ve had to listen to this bollocks about how our boards have been skinflint and tight whilst those at Ibrox have “shown ambition” and “pushed out the boat.”
But Ibrox already lost one club on its strategy and the second is so leveraged and scarred by debt that they fluked their way to a European final last season and still can’t scrape together the cash to get its first proper deal over the line.
Their overspending has put them in real peril and they have a single title and one Scottish Cup to show for it in a decade, and one which coincided with Celtic having the greatest spell of dominance in the game here since the Lisbon Lions.
I have had my moments of anger when this board has seemed to be haggling over pennies.
That was a Lawwell trait, which I hope we’ve consigned to the bin.
But even that haggling was done at a club spending more on wages than every other side in the league put together … and even in that shocking John McGinn window we broke the club transfer record to sign Edouard on a permanent deal.
It is time we put this “biscuit tin” garbage to bed.
It was a media invention, at a time when there were so many tongues up Murray’s posterior that there are still people hacking and coughing in the newsrooms of Scotland today. Keevins is one of them.
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