The Leadership At Celtic Is Further Removed Than Ever From That Across The City.

The board at Celtic Park gets a lot of stick on this site and on others, but I think that this has been an instructive week for those who can’t ever see the good things about those who run our club. It should serve as a reminder that we’re not as bad as is sometimes made out.

There’s a cracking, if somewhat strange, story in The Guardian today about how Sunderland fans are up in arms at their club’s attempt to make their rivals from Newcastle feel welcome when they roll into the Stadium Of Light for their FA Cup game tomorrow. To the disbelief of the home support, the Black Cat Lounge had been decked out in away colours and slogans, including, incredibly, one which actually reads “Cheer Up Peter Reid.”

Sunderland has launched an “internal investigation” into how this was ever allowed, and have taken it all down, but the pictures of it are all over social media to the club’s enormous embarrassment. It’s a lot less serious than giving a Celtic Park lounge to the Ibrox club and emblazoning We Are The Peepul all over it, but that’s a board that doesn’t get it.

I think it’s safe to say that such attempts to make those from Ibrox feel welcome at Celtic Park are not in our future, either immediate or distant. I cannot remember a time when the two clubs were led by boards which were such polar opposites to each other, or when relations were this Antarctic. Those who think our club has anything to learn from them … think again.

Often, this site and others accuse our club of not doing enough on refereeing reform and stuff like this, and whilst I am not going to change my mind on that front, because I don’t think we do, there is some merit in doing things behind the scenes as opposed to getting into a public strop which just makes you look amateurish and more than a little crazy.

But on top of that, it also makes you look weak.

I would be aghast if our club did what theirs has done here, in violating the confidentiality of a meeting, lying about what took place at it and leaking a critical detail – and one so incendiary – to fan groups to let them do the dirty work for you. It is unconscionable and is a stonewall example of a club bringing the game into disrepute. Severe sanctions should result from it, not that I for one minute expect that there will be any.

For all that, this has gotten Ibrox precisely nowhere, not even with an association which is in thrall to the club in many, many ways.

The SFA statement yesterday has made it clear that it will not accede to a single one of Ibrox’s foot stamping demands, and virtually invites them to make the next move.

They know that there’s nothing our rivals can do short of throwing another public tantrum and that makes them look pathetic, even to their own fans who continue to live in a delusional world where this goes to a courtroom (a penalty kick they didn’t get and wouldn’t have gotten had Mike McCurry himself been out on that pitch) or to CAS or ends when their players walk off the pitch at kick-off in their next league game as some mental form of protest. These are just some of the deranged ideas being thrown about on their forums right now.

But all are representative of an idea; the idea their club hasn’t done enough, that they haven’t pushed this as far as they can, that they’ve not picked this as the ditch to die in. What did I say yesterday? This has annihilated the fragile sense they had that the world was ordering itself into a shape of their liking. Suddenly the Unseen Fenian Hand is slapping them all over the map and they “won’t be allowed to win the league”.

And this madness doesn’t come from the bottom of the pile, with these mad fans. It starts from the top of the house. The Chinese say it best; “a fish rots from the head down.”

Subsequent Ibrox boards have had every opportunity to rein in the lunatic fringe; as a I wrote earlier, they made them “official media partners” instead. The club doesn’t just pander to these Peepul, it feeds their insanity, their delusion, their irrationality by indulging their nonsense and even giving them fresh meat to bite into from time to time.

But that has its downside, and the downside of this is that those same rabid supporters now feel as if the club is rolling over. The rest of Scottish football sees them making a demand and the SFA basically telling them where to go. Even some in the media are criticising them today on the back of this, which makes it look even more like they’ve had a spanking.

Celtic’s board might be a collection of folk who have been in office way too long, but at no time have they behaved like spoilt children and deliberately endangered the safety of an official. When you look at the general behaviour of the Ibrox leadership you see a pattern. They obfuscated and messed us about when one of our staff was injured at their ground. They’ve made no effort to protect our supporters. They are very cavalier about this stuff.

The fact of that was enough for our club to refuse tickets for Ibrox, and Celtic was so incensed about it that they have effectively banned their supporters from our ground as long as this is the case. Those who say that our club should “get around the table” with these folks and “sort this out” can try to ignore our repeated efforts to do so already and our public stand on this, which everyone in the country knows full well, but it cannot deny that these two boardrooms are poles apart in every way that matters, and that’s the real problem here.

Our board should not be expected to sit and negotiate with people like this. They cannot be trusted. They cannot be reasoned with in good faith, because you cannot have faith in a single thing that they say. This isn’t the first time they’ve breached confidentiality either; they’ve given the media details of SPFL executive meetings as well, including commercially sensitive information and that they escaped any sort of punishment for that it is disgraceful.

That makes it all the worse when you have people like The Village Idiot comparing our board to theirs or people like Barry Ferguson claiming that they had every right to make demands. Kenny Miller goes on the radio and sounds like a ranting maniac from the darkest corners of Ibrox social media, frothing at the mouth about how much of a “bad taste” a correct decision has left in his mouth … we have marvelled before about the way proximity to that club impacts on people, but to realise that they are all as crazy as each other is genuinely unsettling.

But worse, by far, is the inescapable notion that this madness starts at the very highest level at their club. The more you hear out of that place, the harder that notion is to shake and it paints a very dark picture as far any improvement in relations is concerned.

Our board is not like theirs. Our club is not like theirs. Regardless of the questions we have about those running the shop here, I am forever thankful for that, but on days like this most of all.