What’s the biggest threat to Celtic this season?
Biased refs? A weighted fixture list? The Asian Cup? Hell, is our biggest threat another club? None of those things. Not according to Keith Jackson.
The biggest threat to Celtic this season is us. You and me. The fans. We are the reason he cannot just bring himself to say that we are title favourites.
This guy, he really is creative at times in a sort of horrible way.
He has watched Ibrox’s pre-season, knows their defence is a mess, knows that with so many attacking options that Beale is struggling to make them gel, and that if our new signings are even halfway as good as those who are already in the first team that we’re already stronger than the last campaign … and he also knows that in Rodgers we may well have an even better management structure.
So of course, that’s where he tries to suggest that there might be a problem. Rodgers doesn’t look as if he’s picked the signings, for one, although he admits that our manager would have had to “rubber stamp” them. Which is the same as picking them! But it’s when he turns to the fans and a discussion about us that he really goes off the reservation.
Read this garbage for one;
“The general assumption, at the time of the Aussie’s left field appointment, was Steven Gerrard … would rattle off at least one more championship trophy following their success in 2021. And let’s not allow history to be rewritten where Postecoglou’s unexpected first campaign is concerned. You’d have been hard pushed to find a Celtic fan who thought any differently. Many were too busy unfurling banners in the car park while trying to storm the team bus. All of which just goes to show that this age old rivalry is susceptible to surprise plot twists along the way.”
This is a classic example of what I’m talking about when I refer to people making stuff up, or twisting history, to suit their own narrative.
No such thing was going on at the time of Ange’s appointment, and there were no protests or calls for his sacking, even eight games into the title race when we were fifth or sixth and had lost three and drawn another one.
Some of us – myself included, of course – might have been dead-set against the appointment, but by the time we played those opening games the fans got what Ange was trying to do and even some early bad results did not shake our confidence.
The assertion that none of us expected a title win is also absolute rubbish. Go back to the start of the season, and you’ll find Anthony Dunn and myself and the Endless Celts team in unanimous agreement that we did expect the league title and would consider it a failure not to get it.
And Ange Postecoglou himself freely admitted that this was the general expectation from everyone at the club. There was never any talk of settling for less.
So what straw is he clinging to?
That residual anger over the manner in which Rodgers left the first time will spark revolution if the stands if the team doesn’t hit the ground running. This is a variation on the same them that his idiotic pal Keevins has been running since Brendan walked back in the door. It’s embarrassing that these people work in the mainstream press.
“Are these malcontents so full of their own sense of entitlement that they may rail against the very unity which Rodgers will be seeking to provide? Don’t bet against it and don’t be surprised either if they turn on the manager at the first sign of trouble, in the event that Celtic’s season does not start as emphatically as the last one ended,” he writes.
But I say do bet against it. No Celtic fan group is going to threaten the stability of the club, and nobody will be “turning on” the team even if it takes a while for us to settle into his style of play. As to the emphatic manner the last campaign ended … is he talking about losing heavily at Ibrox? Because that’s not something I want to see repeated.
Jackson simply cannot bring himself to admit that we’re actually in good shape.
No sign of this so-called anger was evident in the stands in Dublin, and I doubt there will be any at Celtic Park tonight and especially not at the weekend.
This club is more unified than these idiots think, and when that particular fantasy can no longer be clung to … what then will they have left?
Nothing except for a long overdue encounter with reality.