As Two More Ibrox Officials Depart, Celtic’s Ralston And Vata Make Sense Of One.

Last night closed out with another resignation at Ibrox, and there’s been another one this afternoon. Last night’s is the easiest to understand; it was the director of their academy, Craig Mulholland.

He was responsible for Gilmour and Patterson.

They were decent talents, although vastly over-rated. Lowry might be a good player.

But we might never know.

At a time when this guy was attempting to develop footballers to play in their first team squad, their side, like ours, was playing its youth in the sixth tier of the game. What’s worse is that they are facing a massive summer rebuild on very little money.

If there was ever a time for giving youth its chance to break through this would be it. Instead their manager is scouring the English free transfer market to sign ex-youth prodigies who didn’t quite get there.

He clearly has no faith at all in the club’s youth.

Mulholland must have looked at “the plan” for the summer with mounting despair. Either way, it was not a great reflection on his skills. He is not a fool. He knows what it means. One way or another, the door, the pathway, to the first team was effectively shut to the players under his charge. Some say we have the same problem.

But nearly every year at Celtic, someone does shatter the glass ceiling in some way or another.

Take Ben Doak, for example.

In spite of the rebuild he would almost certainly have been a full member of the squad had he opted to stay. Ange recognised his talent. Rocco Vata might be the next big thing.

We have nurtured his talents and now we’re about to properly unleash them.

This stuff takes time.

Sometimes players have had to leave our club and return as better players in order to fully realise their potential.

Take Ralston for example. He’s still only 24 so it might surprise people to be reminded that he spent five full years out on loan at other clubs … it’s only now that we’re seeing the fruits of all that hard work. His path hasn’t been plain sailing, but he’s got there, and young enough that he could play at Parkhead for many, many years to come.

Callum McGregor is an even better example. His talents were developed at Celtic before being polished on loan at Notts County. He returned a vastly better player, and now his skills have been honed to a cutting edge.

James Forrest was developed at the club.

So too was Stephen Welsh, and we have actually resisted transfer bids for him and that makes it obvious that he’s rated highly by those inside the club. He has a future here, perhaps a big future.

The media wants you to believe that our academy isn’t producing, but as usual they want it both ways.

There are young Celtic players in Germany, at huge clubs, who would almost certainly have been on the fringes of the first team or in it if they’d still been here. They were the ones who wanted to go, to learn in a better environment than the Lowland League … but whose fault is it that this was our only viable option? Certainly not ours.

Celtic continues to produce talent. Talent sufficiently good to inspire the manager to give players a chance.

Ange has a history of that.

At Ibrox, I don’t believe Mulholland had any faith that there was anything but the remotest prospect that The Mooch would give their young players opportunities sufficient to turn them into first teamers, and in the manager’s defence he clearly did not have the slightest faith that they were good enough to be.

That’s a failure on both sides of the equation.

They did blood a couple of them earlier in the season, and Mulholland must have been thrilled by that. But that was only during a period where there were injuries, and he’ll have heard the plans being laid by The Mooch and the board for the summer and he’ll have recognised that developing talent is not a current priority.

Every available penny is going to be spent on team-ready players … even if they are bad ones.

Even as I’m writing this, the news has broken that Andrew Dickson is leaving Ibrox now.

That’s another key member of the leadership team going, so it’s now not in the least doubt that there is something dramatic happening over there … something the media has been blindly ignoring for weeks is now screaming at them.

Will they finally get off their backsides and bring their readers some clarity on what’s going on over there?

Will they finally do their damned jobs?