Ange Is Right Not To Rest Celtic’s World Cup Players. Our Club Has To Come First.

Quite why anyone would have expected Ange Postecoglou to rest those players of ours with an eye on the World Cup Finals I do not know. Imagine the scenes had he done so and we dropped points as a result of it.

When he was national coach he knew how this stuff worked, and although I’m sure it was frustrating for him at times he got the crucial fact that these guys belong to their clubs and those clubs pay their bills and so the clubs come first.

World Cups are not once in a lifetime tournaments for the players in our squad.

Most of them are young enough that they’ll have a chance to play in several of these in the course of their careers, and if FIFA had its way with their ludicrous bi-annual tournament plan it would be a lot more chances than at present. The clubs have to be ruthless about this.

Ange is a good man, and he likes to help other managers whenever possible. But Ange would never dream of putting Celtic at risk in order to make some national coach’s job a bit easier, just as nobody would have done it for him.

I get that players want to be on that stage. It’s perfectly understandable.

But whilst founded as a charitable endeavour, Celtic is no longer a charity.

The whole World Cup in winter idea is a travesty anyway.

Everyone knows this.

Today Sepp Blatter apologised to the global game and called awarding it to Qatar a “mistake.”

Yeah, like the Great Train Robbery was “a mistake.”

The twin decisions to give Finals to Russia and that petro-state were a flat-out disgrace and a scandal.

Those decisions were corrupt.

No apology will erase the taint of it or remove the stink from it.

Football has tolerated the whole sorry spectacle about as much as it’s prepared to do. Ange is not the only one who doesn’t feel inclined to do that competition any favours.