Ange Is Right To Stop Celtic Players Playing Meaningless International Friendlies.

The Scotland team will be without Celtic players when it next takes the field, and for the first time in many, many years. That is a consequence of Ange’s decision, yesterday, to inform Steve Clarke and the SFA that he would not release a single one of them for the pointless international friendlies which are taking part around the World Cup.

Presumably, other national associations have had the same message out of Celtic Park. Ange actually used the phrase I put in a piece yesterday; “Celtic comes first.”

The Australian tour has been booked and the fans over there expect to see a Celtic team, not a shadow squad, and the boss is determined that they will see exactly that.

It is about time we stopped sending international players to take part in these meaningless games, and there are still far, far too many meaningless games on the national squad calendar.

Celtic is using the clause which says that no club is obliged to release players unless there is actually something up for grabs in an international fixture. It might be the first time in my living memory that we’ve actually told national associations that we’ll exercise that right, and shows you – as if you ever doubted it – that there is real steel in our manager.

But the most important takeaway from it is that he regards our support, and their rights to watch the best possible team, as his paramount concern. When we talk about how a manager “get it” what do we really mean? I like to think that we mean he understands what it’s like to be a fan and has not forgotten that although he’s on the other side of white line.

Ange definitely gets it. He gets us, as a club, too.

In the very first presser he did with the fans I heard him say, quite clearly, that he will fight our corner and never let anything come before the job he does on behalf of the club. As with everything else that man says, he was not kidding.