Fear And Loathing In Eindhoven: Celtic Take The TV Pot As The Mooch Hits The Skids.

With ten minutes left to go last night, and the score at 5-1 to the Dutch I had a revelatory moment; for some twenty or so minutes I had been trying to figure out what formation the Ibrox side was playing and I simply could not do it. They were all over the place, tactically, positionally, but that wasn’t the problem. I couldn’t remember their starting eleven.

I knew who had come off and who had come on, and broadly where they fit into the picture.

But maddeningly I kept coming up short as though there was a missing footballer.

Turns out I was right, but he was actually there on the pitch and had been since the start of the game; I only realised who he was in that moment of clarity when he took a wild shot that sailed over the bar.

I turned to my old man and said “That’s who the eleventh player is!”

He had no idea what I meant. He too had forgotten that the guy was on the pitch.

He thought that he must have come on as a sub, but Jose Cifuentes was right there. He played the full game although if he touched the ball more than a dozen times I will be astonished. I have seen players be anonymous in games. It is the first time in a long time that I’ve seen one disappear completely as though a hole had opened up and swallowed him.

Niko Raskin didn’t last the full game. He was the first player The Mooch subbed up. The midfield enforcer was dire. His performance was embarrassingly bad. So too was that of Matondo although he had a decent run and a shot which clipped the post. It’s not worth having a guy on the pitch to have one moment in a game, and one that doesn’t produce.

People, as usual, would have been wetting their pants with hero worshiping excitement when Tavernier scored. He does get plenty of goals, but I wouldn’t have him near a Celtic team because he cannot defend to save his life and that’s what his job is supposed to be. I guarantee you that for every goal he scores he costs them two in critical games.

I love that he made the Ibrox Hall Of Fame, the first Sevco player to do so, joining all those Ibrox luminaries of the dead club. It reeks of the mediocrity of the last twelve years.

It reeks of what their fans now tolerate and accept as normal.

I have spent the last fortnight or so criticising our club.

That’s what I do when our own club drops the ball or moves slowly or isn’t getting the job done.

I critique. I complain. I give them a nudge to get their backsides moving.

It’s how I show the love, and whilst I have precious little of it for the Lawwell-Desmond nexus these guys are guilty of lower-case ambition, arrogance and perhaps an abundance of caution.

But they are not stupid people, and they are not by any stretch of the imagination bad custodians. Celtic is very well run, at the business level, even if these people occasionally get confused as to what their actual jobs are. At Ibrox, their leaders are both bad and stupid, and that they allowed The Mooch to spend what he did this summer proves it.

They were horrendous. They were thoroughly dismantled by PSV, who aren’t exactly world beaters based on what I watched over the two legs. I knew they would dispatch the Ibrox club to the Europa League but I never at any point prior to the games, and especially in the first leg, thought they would blow them away quite so readily, without breaking a sweat.

But we’ve watched this Ibrox team since this campaign began and I keep on saying it; they are not a good side. They are weak at the back, their forward line are lumbering big beasts, their tactics are strictly second rate and The Mooch is a joke.

The excuses he made last night, the ones he was permitted to make by the hacks in the room, were pathetic. He genuinely has no idea why he lost. He genuinely does not recognise that his team selection was ludicrous, that his approach, playing third rate public park football was easily found out and exposed by a good club with good players … all of this is on him.

He bought these guys. He doesn’t look as if he did it for any other reason than they are big bruisers who he can lump the ball up to.

Regular readers will know I’m a huge West Wing fan.

There is an episode in which American soldiers are killed in Colombia, in a simple trap involving a radio operator sending fake transmissions to lure them into an ambush. President Bartlett is furious, and accuses his generals of falling for “a stratagem so sophisticated, it’s an entire generation beyond “Hey, look! Your shoelaces are untied!””

And that’s The Mooch’s tactics. I find it impossible to imagine how he could have believed that they would be good enough to beat a team with a manager who understands how to organise a side and who has the players to turn out your lights if you give them a chance.

There is no artistry in this; it’s Football Manager For Beginners. You see more finesse and tactical shrewdness at a juniors game. A decent side, a European level team, was always going to hurt them … and their fans are going to get the shock of their lives if they expect this joker to take them on another Europa League run playing like that.

For that club of theirs the pain isn’t over, it’s just starting. Whether we win, lose or draw at the weekend I believe we’ll win this title with room to spare because the worst that happens is we leave Ibrox a mere two points behind, and we have yet to hit first gear, and this guy is floundering and you can see it already. You can smell the weakness on him.

He sat there the other day and made the astonishing claim that for his club last night was a “no lose situation.” His board must have been aghast. Their fans must have been appalled.

A no-lose situation? Well, how’s this for no lose? That single result has taken £2.5 million out of their pockets … and put it into ours, because we’ll no longer have to split the “national TV pool” money with them. That’s over and above the huge disparity in European Group Stage income that accrues from being in one competition instead of the other.

It’s another vast opening up of the finance gap … and he’s kidding himself on if he doesn’t think that matters. That’s next season’s transfer budget. That’s spending money in January. That’s more advantages to Celtic, if our board decides to press them.

He’s already been told, by the board, that this window has to pay for itself with outgoings. That’s the loss of Kamara, if they can ship him out, and Davies if someone will take him. They thought they would get a big fee for Hagi; he went out on loan so no huge transfer kitty will be coming their way for him. Do you see any other bankable assets in that squad?

Every penny they miss out on is bad enough. Every penny they miss out on and which flows into our pockets … exponentially worse. What you want now is for Aberdeen to get through in the Europa League and take half of the TV pot for that competition as well, further weakening them and strengthening one of the clubs around them.

There is both fear and loathing on their forums today, but then those emotions rampage on those forums every day of the week. But once again The Mooch is under pressure, and he should be. They have played eight games so far this season and lost two, drawn two and won four. The four included a narrow win at home to Servette and another against Morton.

They look across the city and they see we’ve not had our own troubles to seek, but they also see last season’s treble winners, and a manager who knows his stuff, and new signings trying to integrate and an injury crisis we’re trying to weather and they know that there will be major improvements in our form as we go on … they aren’t so sure about their own club.

And that scares them. And it should scare them, because even as I write this we’re completing signings and putting in place the pieces of the team that will get us to January.

As players return to fitness in the next two months a strong Celtic squad will just increasingly get stronger and stronger and stronger … and right now they are in no position to take advantage of us when we appear weak.

Their season is only a few months old. Already they can see the writing on the wall.

If we win on Sunday, the people in charge there will have no place to hide.