Celtic Sleepwalks To Three Points And Closer To A Disastrous Unravelling.

Today was wholly unsurprising to those of us who have watched this transfer window inch closer to the end with mounting anger and dread. The fractured state of the football department is clear on nights such as these. The doubts can be held at bay for a while, and by some good performances and results, but they are never kept out for very long.

This is the most incoherent season I’ve seen from Celtic in more than a decade. The weight of the mistakes we’ve made is crushing. We might yet be on the verge of the biggest of them all. The need for reinforcements of significant quality was screaming at us. That we look almost certain to close out this window without them is horrifying.

That was not a good performance today, no matter what the manager or anyone else has to say. That was rank. For Rodgers to actually praise the performance and blame the state of the pitch – shocking, by the way, and another indictment on those in charge of the club who want to do everything cheap in spite of the enormous cash surplus we’re sitting on – and then to suggest that Palma’s missed penalties unsettled the fans and the team suggests that he’s either saving the real stuff for the meetings behind the scenes or he’s no longer playing with a full deck of cards.

We were wasteful, lax and far too slow today in everything we did. They had the better chances late in the game. We scored our only goal with an early deflection. Without it, I do believe we’d have dropped points this afternoon. The number of players who got pass marks today you could count on one hand, and only then for effort, not quality.

Let me tell you what troubles me most. One of the lowest scores on the day would have gone to Kyogo, and not for the first time this season. He was ineffectual bordering on non-existent. He played the full 90 minutes. The only reason he did is that there was nobody on the bench who could have stepped up and filled his spot. Furthermore, had we had a full squad to choose from, including Oh and Maeda, I still wouldn’t have been convinced by either change.

Kyogo has turned up this season in a handful of matches, and in many others he’d have been as well taking the afternoon off. He doesn’t fit Rodgers’ system at all, and that becomes more and more clear the more you watch him flounder in it. This is no longer a case of finding a backup for the guy, we need someone who better suits the style. It’s bad enough that we’re essentially betting the house on number 8, but when number 8 has only showed form on a handful occasions that strategy stops being risky and starts to look insane.

It is unconscionable for those in charge of our club to have left the manager no option but to play a non-functioning player for the full match this afternoon, but that’s where we are. The window is another day closer to shutting, and Rodgers sounded genuinely clueless about what is going on behind the scenes. Or maybe he no longer cares.

I know this much; the recruitment department is not operating according to the football departments need at this moment in time. The summer was bad, with so many cheap signings and none of the immediate first team quality we were entitled to expect.

The January window is so much worse, because it’s clear that either the manager hasn’t won his battles at all, that he hasn’t set down a marker, that the same people who screwed up at the start of this campaign are still arrogant enough to believe they know better than he does, or the head of recruitment is an incompetent who only got the job through daddy.

Let’s be honest, neither of those scenarios is appealing. Neither offers much hope for the next few days, and worse; neither outcome is good for next season either. Let’s put it this way; if Rodgers wins this title with this team and no further reinforcements, the geniuses in the boardroom will simply take that as more evidence of their own brilliance and nothing will change. If we don’t win the title, Rodgers head will roll, they’ll blame him for not properly working with the players he was given and the next guy won’t even have a say in the matter.

I’ve been doing this job a long time and everyone know I tell it how I feel it and there’s no point in anything else, so I’m going to lay it out. The team-building has been so unstructured and unfocussed that its already hamstrung us. But if we don’t add the striker and the left back we need before this window shuts, we’re in a lot of trouble.

And if on top of that failure, Ibrox signs Shankland from Hearts, we won’t win the league. Because we’ll drop enough points between now and the end of the season that they’ll edge in front simply because they have a penalty box finisher and we don’t.

Then the coming summer becomes a mad scramble to rebuild, with top players certain to leave and the manager will clearly have to go with them, leaving us facing yet another summer of uncertainty brought about by the lack of strategic thinking at the top of our house.

This entire season has been a mess so far. A shambles. Do I think we’ll turn it around in four days? I absolutely don’t. Right now, we’re lucky to be sitting top. If the next four days play out the way they look like going, and we win this title anyway it will be in spite of policies which look like self-sabotage. You can see the writing on the wall ten meters high.

And I think we’re sleepwalking towards disaster anyway.