For Celtic Fans, The Waiting Is The Hardest Part.

This bit is always torture, like the afternoon before a first date. You don’t know whether you want the clock to speed up or slow down. Always, with these things, there is the nagging feeling that if it’s taking this long that something has gone awry somewhere, something people are frantically trying to sort out behind the scenes. Possibly to no avail.

We’ve been here before. But really, only once, with Eddie Howe. The experience is still fresh enough that the faint lines of scars are still visible. But there are so many reputations tied up in this – including Rodgers own – you can’t see how it could fall apart without doing momentous damage to everyone involved. This one has run too far not to happen.

Tom Petty said it best in his hit song; “The waiting is the hardest part.”

And it has always been the hardest part of these things, whether it’s transfer negotiations for a player we all want or the unveiling of a new boss.

The doomsayers will have a blast making up stories and people will spread rumours, often such stupid rumours than a child who took a minute could see through them, and the media will paint its disaster narratives … none of it will matter..

There are some in our support who will rewrite history with abandon; those saying that it was Chris Davies who was the real brains behind the operation sound an awful lot like those at Ibrox trying to ascribe the best bits of Gerrard’s dreadful record to The Mooch without any of the negatives.

The other narrative, that Brendan needs to improve his player trading model, would be taken a lot more seriously if they had questioned how much of his transfer spending at Celtic was directed by his own choices and how many were imposed on him from elsewhere; we all know it happened. It would also be better if some of them had not written such classics as “Neil Lennon knows how to spend your money”, perhaps the worst excuse for that dire appointment ever promoted.

Postecoglou was the first Celtic boss since Martin O’Neill to have had total command of the transfer options. It worked brilliantly, because the football men are better at making decisions like these than the bean-counter brigade ever will be. The days of signing the likes of Nadir Cifti and people trying to tell us that he was the manager’s first choice are over with.

But in the absence of an announcement, this is the kind of noise that will dominate, that and the raw panic which you can see on some of the fan forums. Although much of the debate on those forums is hilariously brilliant – and our media freely nicks from it, such as with the story this morning of Celtic fans tracking aircraft – you can detect concern creeping into the discourse and this is the fertile ground in which dark rumours are planted and grow.

And even as they do, the worst option the board has – Enzo Maresca – has been removed from the table with the news that he is Leicester City bound. This should be a reason for rejoicing if nothing else is; even in the event something unforeseen does go wrong here, we are not now going to appoint a complete rookie in the hope that the City Group label comes complete with some high-end alchemy. Decisions at our club cannot be made on that basis.

So yes, there will be a lot of fun had at our expense and especially as this now looks set to drag on into a weekend when we really all thought that it would be over. Remember what I said earlier in the week though; this club has promised Rodgers a revolution, the same one they promised to Postecoglou, and so presumably if this all did fall through that revolution would still be on offer to the next guy. That makes this an exciting time … however long it takes.

And realistically, although it’s not what we hoped for, a Monday announcement makes a kind of sense. That way, we dominate an entire week’s new cycle … so the cynics will get their weekend. Once this revolution hits high gear that’s all they’ll get.