Celtic Does Not Have To Sell Before We Can Buy, No Matter What Some Hacks Think.

Let me tell you who is a pain in the backside to read; Kenneth Ward at The Evening Times.

People think I take diversions instead of getting to the point, but Jesus, he makes me look like Joe McHugh when it comes to grabbing a subject by the throat, and that’s a compliment to my good friend and colleague who does it better than anyone in the game.

Ward’s latest article took us on yet another tour of his crowded personal life and his kid’s Christmas presents before he got to the subject matter yesterday; I like to think that my own diversions and intros are a bit more interesting than that.

The point of his piece was little better; that ourselves and Ibrox should be focussed on getting people out the door before we’re thinking about bringing people in. And it’s a ridiculous suggestion.

He contends that we’ve got too many players of the same type already.

Errr … yeah. We’ve sort of figured that out. Which is why we want players in who don’t just give us more of the same. That’s the point Rodgers has been making over and over again for the whole time he’s been back; maybe this guy has missed that amidst everything else he’s got going on.

But if he doesn’t know that then his article comes perilously close to pontificating on a subject he’s largely ignorant on. Rodgers hasn’t been shy about saying that we need more quality and a different kind of footballer; just look at what he said about Turnbull recently, about how he does certain things but can’t do other things which the manager thinks the team needs.

There’s also an implication in his piece that we would be constrained from bringing people in unless we could also move people out.

This is far from the truth.

We are most certainly not in a position where we have to sell before we can buy, even with this too-big squad that we have, and aside from a few pro-Ibrox fantasists who believe that our money is either not really there or will soon be swallowed up in some dark fantasy black hole of theirs, everyone knows this.

Besides, Rodgers and the club have been working on the bloat problem even as they are putting together their signings shortlist … we will be doing these things in tandem.

Ward is also ignoring the rather large elephant in the room, which we’ve been writing about for a while; the looming Asian Cup which means that we need to have a striker in place almost from the kick-off. That simply won’t wait, we can’t afford to be dragging our feet on it or waiting to see who we can get out the door first.

Again, he’s either completely oblivious to that or he’s simply ignoring it to make his ridiculous point. But there’s a clock ticking. It is not going to stop just because we think we have one too many players on the books as it is. That signing is essential.

Where his article might have had a spark of sanity and a halfway decent point is if he had limited it to talking about the needs of the Ibrox club, which are very different than ours.

They are the ones, after all, with the squad of second-raters and wastes of money, even as they carry rising levels of debt and the biggest wage bill in the country.

They most certainly cannot simply go out and spend money without bringing some of it in the door first, and had he said that there might have been some legitimate point amongst the list of presents under his Christmas tree.

I have read some pretty idiotic articles on our proposed January policy. His has to be the worst, and the one which comes across as the most ignorant.

This club will spend in that window because it has to.

It will spend because the manager is looking beyond the immediate horizon and we want to have the new players bedded in way in advance of Europe next season.

I get why people like Ward, and The Village Idiot, are running variations of this line.

They simply cannot compete with us in January and we know it and they know it and they are scared to death that Rodgers has gotten through to the board and will get his men.

And you know what? They should be.