All Celtic Had To Do In January Was Prove The Doubters Wrong. They Didn’t.

How do you know when an argument is worth having and not? It’s worth having if the matter can be easily settled one way or another. That’s the kind of argument a lot of us in Celtic cyberspace have been having since the appointment of Mark Lawwell, and then the return of Peter Lawwell as the club chairman.

All the way through that argument two things have been readily apparent; the first is that those of us who thought they would take us backwards badly wanted to be wrong and the second was that it would be easy for the club to prove that we were.

If these people intended to back the manager properly then they would. If Mark Lawwell was some sort of genius of recruitment we would recruit brilliantly and it would be so obvious that we were in good hands that the debate itself would seem pointless. The last two windows would have offered irrefutable evidence that we were hysterical cry-babies.

Instead, what? What can we take from two transfer windows which have delivered 12 signings, a trading profit of £11 million and not one guaranteed starting eleven footballer? Two of the signings have already left on loan. One who was on loan has returned to his club. Of the remaining nine, two have just arrived and of the seven left only Palma has been a regular and that due to the injury to Abada and absences from Maeda, and Bernardo who has been in the team due to Hatate’s absence, an absence which we can now extend another two months. One of the others has no future here at all, and is already well aware that the manager has no intention of playing him,

We came out of the window with the midfield weakened by the departure of David Turnbull. We failed to sign a left back. If Kyogo gets injured our forward line is Oh, who hasn’t done nearly enough to suggest he’s capable of scoring regularly and now our temporary striker from Norwich reserves, here on loan. We have no backup keeper, which is why Seigrist continues to suck money out of the club, along with Scott Bain. Carter Vickers is injured, and so Lagerbielke stays, the sort of unhappy player we’re told that a club should jettison immediately.

What does it all tell us? That our concerns were ridiculous? That we owe Mark Lawwell and his dad an apology for having doubted them? Had these windows delivered the kind of footballers the manager himself has called for, we would look pretty stupid, wouldn’t we? And we would be glad to look stupid. We would be delighted to have been proved wrong.

Let’s ditch the emotional reaction here. Let’s strip out of the discussion words like cronyism and nepotism. Let’s forget for a minute The Shower Scene From Hampden, much gorier and more horrible than Hitchcock’s black and white masterpiece. Put them to the side for a moment and just approach this from the standpoint of logic and reason.

Our contention was that hiring Mark Lawwell as head of recruitment was not a step forward but a sign that our club no longer looks to surround the manager with the most qualified people it can find. His record since taking over is that he’s signed over twenty footballers across four transfer windows and the number of them who are first team regulars in the side right now can be counted on one hand. That suggests that he has not been successful.

But of course, this is not the only criteria on which Mark Lawwell is being judged. The board will judge Mark Lawwell on how many of the players he has signed go on to leave for major fees, and return a profit. How many of them look like doing that?

Well, to answer that you have to look at who the current blue-chip players in the Celtic team are. They are, in no particular order, Maeda, Hatate, McGregor, O’Riley, Abada, Carter Vickers and Kyogo. Aside from McGregor, who gets in there because he’s captain and still the best midfielder at the club, each and every one of those guys was here before Mark Lawwell arrived.

That’s not an emotional appeal to march to the car-park and get out the pitch-forks. That’s a cold-blooded factual analysis which most organisations would be doing in-house right now, especially considering the money we’re talking about both in terms of transfer trading and in terms of what we’d potentially leave on the table if we lost this league.

To me, looking over the evidence, it seems clear that we’re not doing this right. We have a squad over-bloated in certain areas and badly lacking in others. Even without concerns over nepotism and cronyism, which I think are obviously well-founded, Lawwell’s record in the job isn’t standing up to scrutiny and if this was a manager on the back of two seasons of failure we would be entirely justified in asking how much longer he gets.

Which brings us to the new argument; accountability and again there are two sides to this; the one which claims that the people who run this club don’t believe in that and will protect themselves and their cronies (and their kids) no matter what, and those who believe that Celtic is built and run on merit. Once again, it’s fairly easy to demonstrate who is right and who is wrong … so look again at Mark Lawwell’s record and tell me if it justifies retaining his services or not, and then look at what happens to him, and if he’s still in post this coming summer.