Celtic Should Not Be Going Into This Game Today Without At Least One Signing.

All week long, one thing has been clear; we cannot possibly go into the game at Ibrox next week with too many changes in the squad. We certainly cannot be throwing four or five new people into that game because there is no way they will be co-ordinated enough, and this is especially true at the back. We should have made sure they had time to gel.

The best way to do that is give these guys time in a game, time to work things out. They should have been in place this week. We should have signed somebody in time for today’s game. It is now too late to get a new signing in place. The two positions which were most important in that regard were the defensive midfielder and the centre back.

I don’t even know if we’re going to sign a defensive, iron man midfielder now. The drumbeat says it’ll be a centre back, a left back, a striker and maybe a keeper. But nobody is really talking too much about a midfield enforcer. I think one of those is probably more important than the centre back, because he’s the sort of guy who can protect the defence.

I think it’s dereliction of duty that this board has allowed a whole week to go by without getting at least one key piece of business done.

I said earlier in the week that it seems to me that the policy is all that matters to them, the policy of signing cheap players and selling them for a profit. There is certainly little thought as to what the manager needs.

They are willing to send him into Ibrox next week with players who have barely met.

The manager knows this. I know we’ll do business this week, as we really don’t have much choice but to make several more signings, but I wonder if more than one or two of them will start the game next weekend. I think even if we do have to go in there with Lagerbiekle and Scales as our centre backs that he’ll do that rather than make too many changes.

It is good that we’re going to get a signing over the line next week. It’s good that we have “irons in the fire” as one tabloid rag put it today. But God, had these people just moved a little bit quicker we would have gotten an opportunity to blood people in a game at home in front of our own crowd before that hostile environment in front of only theirs.

It stuns me that people like Lawwell, whose defenders claim is a great Celtic fan and a supporter “just like us” allows us to go into these sorts of games so scandalously unprepared.

They’ve had an entire summer and here we are with a week to go … appalling.