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

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.