Celtic’s Season Is Obviously Unravelling. It’s Clear Where The Blame Lies.

It is as we feared. This toiling Celtic team does not have enough in it to get through this campaign with a decent run of form. This team needed a major injection of quality in the window and have not had it. Too many players aren’t on it right now, and without a doubt one of the reasons they are not on it is because they walk into their places every week and not only do they have no challengers there but they are being played every week against teams who have us figured out.

This team has gone backwards in terms of the quality available to the manager. Injuries are only part of it. We took the Jota money, banked it, and spent some but not all of it. We have Champions League money this season.

Why did we bother getting excited over that fact? A run in the Europa League would have served us better because we’d have picked up co-efficient points. Without improving the squad, we were also-rans at that level. Without spending the money from it what was the point in being there? I didn’t attend a single Champions League home game. I had zero interest in doing so. The board made it clear they didn’t give a toss about that tournament and so neither did I. The money I could have spent on the tickets, I used to go to Rome. I don’t regret it.

Today, before the game, there was an anti-board banner and chants against Lawwell. This board is extremely fortunate that we’re still a couple of weeks away from a game at Celtic Park. The rest of us are very unfortunate in that regard as this team doesn’t look capable of getting there without another reversal. This season is a shit-show.

This board was banking on us getting to Parkhead having won these February games. At the same time as they sneer at this manager, they are also betting that he has enough at his disposal to get through this run with the team in this abject state. They hide behind Rodgers whilst simultaneously believing he can work miracles.

Look at the players who are off their game right now. Alastair Johnston is the one unquestioned Lawwell junior success story; how fitting that he had his worst 90 minute since signing today, but it’s not for nothing that I speculated that if he had a quality back-up that he might not be in the team. He’s been going backwards for months. He does not look like our next blue-chip player. Lawwell junior has signed over 20 footballers and not found one yet.

This feels like a season that is coming apart. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to have a happy ending, and that feeling has been there all throughout this campaign, and it started on the day the manager sat at an early press conference and said that he would work with what he was given; that sounded so utterly alien in comparison to what we had expected that it washed over us like a black wave. Things have never felt right since. Rodgers and Lawwell do not play well together and daddy’s boy running the manager’s transfer policy had disaster written all over it.

The team which started this game today had three summer signings in it. Had Carter Vickers been fit there would have been no Nawrocki in it. Had Hatate been fit there would have been no Bernardo. Had Maeda been available Palma would have been benched. 12 signings. A total of £20 million spent. But £30 million in transfer incomings … and we finished the game with a Norwich reserve up front, Scales and Welsh at central defence, Vata wide left and Tony Ralston at left back.

With respect to Idah, he played reasonably well but we could not possibly have envisioned a Celtic team with those other four in it chasing a game at Pittodrie in the last ten minutes, in order to save our lead at the top of the table, when this season started. There cannot be a graver indictment of “the strategy” than this. For those still living in denial, it’s wake up time.

Yes, we’re in the early stages of a crisis here. It cannot end before heads have rolled.