If Celtic’s New Bhoy Is Player Of The Year People At Ibrox Have Big Questions To Answer.

I see a couple of the sites have raised the interesting question as to whether our new boy Luis Palma is already a player of the year contender.

It is a good question, even this early in the day, because he has started so brilliantly and you can only see him getting better. The better he gets the more likely it is that he’ll leave everyone else in the dust.

Whatever the media thinks, or is going to report, the top contenders all already look as if they are coming out of Celtic Park.

There will be a token Ibrox player on the short-list of course, but if we win this league comfortably it’ll be our guys making the headlines.

O’Riley will be in the running. Kyogo too most definitely. But Palma does look special, and he does look as if he could do big things.

He has a good number of assists and goals already and it’s not hard to imagine him having more “goal contributions” when you add them all up than any other player in the league, including our supreme goal-scorer.

If this goes the way it looks like, then I wonder who in the media will care to be reminded of their pitiful snark that Ibrox turned this guy down?

Those who are reminded of that will doubtless blame The Mooch; he, after all, is the one who sat in front of the media and uttered this nonsense for the record, even as his own signings were badly flopping.

Blaming The Mooch is easy. Everyone at that club, from the directors on down to those in the stands who give up their money, find it both simple and convenient to lay the disaster of the summer at his door, along with much else.

That a relatively straightforward start from Clement has him touted as a world beater has also seen a final verdict on the previous boss which suggests that all their problems vanished the moment he was out the door.

He was a fool. An absolute goon who this website mocked from the moment he was hired until the moment they jettisoned him.

I used to look forward to every press conference he did and I had a feeling that when the unravelling happened it would be fast, and it was. But for anyone over there to think that sacking him took care of business, as though he was the only person at the club making decisions, is preposterous. He certainly was not.

Those above him failed lamentably.

Those who exited the club prior to the summer left him with nothing but a bag of raw sewage. Whatever happened with Palma points to lamentable failures at every level, and to blame The Mooch for all of them is to pretend to believe that those failures can be laid at one door. Whatever the truth is, they can’t.

The media spin at the time the move fell apart said he was reluctant to come to Scotland. If that had been true, how come we eventually got him?

If it was a matter of the transfer fee then that’s a ridiculous failure on their part and an admission that they squandered so much on junk that they had nothing left over for the quality. Did they not think he was worth the salary?

Amazing that a club with a bigger wage bill than ours didn’t manage to agree a deal for a player of this quality whilst we did.

And if it wasn’t those factors, what exactly was it?

Could it be that they couldn’t sell him on a vision for the club? Maybe he was just unimpressed by the god-awful poverty of the management team and its quality. Both are damning of more than just the manager himself. And if they pure and simple didn’t want him, is that any better?

There’s no way to spin this at all which shows anyone at that club in a favourable light, and whilst blaming the manager for it is the simple thing to do it fails to take into account what more and more looks like a vast collective failure at that club, and one that hasn’t just delivered to us yet another bankable asset but a superb footballer in the here and now.

At a time when they are celebrating the biggest wage bill in the league, that’s the kind of reversal which the media should be exploring in depth.

No wonder they aren’t.