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The Campaign To Destabilise Celtic Has Failed Because Our Club Didn’t Focus On It.

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As I wrote earlier today, last night Ange Postecoglou did an interview where he delivered the message that the Celtic fans have been most wanting to hear, one where he told us straight that he’ll be at the club a while and that there’s no need to worry.

That this comes on the back of a cup final victory which has temporarily silenced the club across the city and plunged it into a very dark place is nothing but good for us. Someone said to me the other day that this meant we could now “focus on the treble.”

But in truth, we’re here because we already had the focus to get there. Not a focus on it, but that focus which has taken us, step by step, towards it and which continues to. One game at a time. One win at a time. Keep on moving forward, ignore the white noise.

That might end up being the most important part of all this; ignore the white noise. It may be why the club was so swift to move on Giakoumakis and Juranovic; they had become part of the white noise. Their contract situations had become distractions, at a time when this club cannot be doing with any of that. Ange wants everyone looking the same way.

It brings me back to Stoicism, this idea of control. As I’ve said before, I don’t know what books Ange Postecoglou reads or whether he self-defines as a Stoic, but one of the principles is to realise that there are matters where you do have control and others where you don’t.

Memento Mori – remember death – is not just about that one thing … the idea of living each day as if it were your last encompasses more than just taking pleasure in each moment.

When the great Warren Zevon was dying, he went on Letterman and gave a stunning interview the most memorable moment of which was to tell the presenter, his good friend, that if he’d learned anything at all from the knowledge of what was coming that it was to “enjoy every sandwich.”

Simple stuff, but that’s how he stayed linked to the good things instead of dwelling on the bad.

But Memento Mori also means, as Zevon knew well, that you should focus only on the things that are within your control. He responded to his diagnosis by committing his last year to one final album and calling in every favour from every musician and friend he had in the business, to leave his kids and his grandchild the best life he could.

The album, The Wind, won two Grammy’s and is a fantastic testimony to what we’re all capable of if we work to a single purpose.

That’s this team, and its unrelenting focus.

Ange said it himself last night; you cannot control what the media will write, only how you respond to it. And the way he’s chosen to respond to it is to lock it out of his considerations and to make sure that everyone at the club does the same.

The club cannot stop the press from writing speculation and utter nonsense, and nor should we spend time and energy fire-fighting every false claim and stupid story. That, in many ways, is what we in the blogosphere are for. The club doesn’t have to do that because we do it instead and we’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years.

Look at the state The Mooch has gotten himself into it, picking an unwinnable fight with Sutton, and of course he’s not the only one he wants to do battle with, a subject I assure you I will be returning to and exploring in some detail in due course.

That’s a man whose focus is everywhere all at once, and if you’re doing that you are missing important things. He’s not the only one at Ibrox who is all over the map. Their club is a troubled place. That is obvious now, and as I said this morning it gets to a point where even their fans can’t keep on denying the truth of this.

But nothing distracts us. Nothing is allowed to split our focus. The players are back in training today and the celebrations are over with and now the focus, the sole focus, is on the next game. Not the treble, not some distant football match against their club, not next season and the Champions League. St Mirren, away, the only team to beat us domestically.

This is why the campaign to destabilise us has failed. This is why it has no hope of success. Because we will not acknowledge it far less respond to it because everyone in the club is buying into the project now, from the boss down, and part of that is the laser focus on what matters, what really matters, the only things that matter.

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11 comments

  • Kevan McKeown says:

    We’re in trouble now tho, they’ve played a mastercard and brought in a ‘winning culture specialist’ tae sort their heads out. How embarrassin is that ??

    • Johnny Green says:

      An American mindset expert by all accounts, maybe an expert on Klan Kulture so he should fit right in. I’m sure he will make a big difference. I’m glad we got that wee game out of the way before he arrived. LOL

    • SFATHENADIROFCHIFTINESS says:

      ‘Mastercard’? More like a joker.
      Hope the guy gets paid up front.

  • John S says:

    The Undermining is so predictable, so usual, so pathetic.

  • Mick Caldwell says:

    Time the joke of scottish and english so called jounalism owed up for their lies and apologised !

  • TonyB says:

    Picture a flim flam artist waving a gold watch backwards and forwards in front of the sevcvnts …………………….

    You are getting sleeepy.

    Now you are uuunder.

    Picture yourself lifting a trophy.

    That’ll be 10 grand please.

    See you next week.

    Just off to the bank…….. Chortle.

    • Peter Allison says:

      Very articulate and 100% correct. Our club is a family and the mindset of looking to the next game and concentrating solely on that by our manager and team is perfect. The chairman and directors look after the rest and we as supporters like our team .. we never stop HH

  • Frank says:

    “Buying into the project” A comment repeated by Joe Hart at his on pitch interview.

  • John Copeland says:

    Yes the campaign to destabilise Celtic’s cup final preparations failed ,but should never be forgotten the way the SMSM and others tried every trick in the dirty book to do so ! The only thing missing was Kyogo and Megan Markle having an illicit affair ,such was their horrendous tactics to disrupt the build up to Sundays victorious win …. Still ,I suppose the scoops might just resort to that kind of fable to try to sell their failing rags !Watch this space …

  • Tenaka Khan says:

    Ange is here long enough to see Scottish football for what it is. He understands the Ibrox team and their media cheerleaders even more than most of us who’ve lived with it all our lives. The thought of his club being constantly linked to that cesspit will be sickening to him. Like Ange, I grew up as an immigrant in Melbourne during the 70s and I can guarantee that he knows supremacism and bigotry when he sees it. Ange will never go along with the media’s twin club agenda. He’ll relegate all talk of them within the bounds of Celtic Park to when they are our next match. To me, he’s determined to establish a culture of our players seeing them as just one of the other teams in the league. Not just out of pragmatism, but also because he sees them for what they are and he’s loath to see our club being tainted by association.

  • Joseph Mcaleer says:

    So true,the MSM are irrelevant now,I’m 71 and haven’t bought newsprint in years,its 7 days a week dross.and let’s not mention BBC Scotland/Sportscene bloody awful,
    A Ibrox redundancy club.payed for by public money.

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