Folk Close To Celtic Are Making The Usual Pitiful Promises Of “Jam Tomorrow.” Ignore Them.

The “news” this morning that we “tried” to get Mathias Kvistgaarden in the January window comes as no surprise. After the calls for unity, the next tactic is always the hard luck story.

“Oh, but look what we almost did …”

As someone smarter than me once said, “Nearly wouldn’t have put a man on the moon.”

And it makes no difference to where we are.

Beyond the hard luck story they play one additional card; the promise of “jam tomorrow.”

As in, “well nobody wanted to sell us players in January but we’ll be back in the summer for them.” Ignore it. Ignore it all. Every bad transfer window the same lousy stories emerge, snaking out of Celtic Park from people who don’t want to be held to account in the here and now.

It’s exactly as I wrote this morning; “someday never comes.”

I genuinely couldn’t care less what we “tried” to do. When you attempt something and just can’t get it done, don’t they have a name for that? Yes, they call it failure.

So, if people inside the club want us to know they failed then, yes, I could probably get behind that because sure as Hell somebody failed, as we don’t have what we need. And in a corporate setting failure would have consequences, wouldn’t it? Anywhere there was genuine accountability.

We’ve heard “jam tomorrow” too many times to be conned by it.

The promises of “jam tomorrow” are always, let’s not forget, followed by demands for money in the here and now. We do not, after all, have the option of “wait and see” with our season tickets, do we? So, then it all becomes about trust, and the idea makes me laugh. History tells us not to do that, it contains so many lessons we would be mad to ignore them.

Had the people responsible for recruitment done their jobs right they’d have had spent the summer compiling their lists, agreed them with the manager well in advance, and they’d have been ready to go on the first day of the window, targeting those at the top and working their way through the options list in a methodical way. Instead, we had the usual unseemly scramble on the final day where, by all accounts, we went to clubs for players we could have asked about at any point during the month but chose not to bother with until the last minute.

And I don’t know whether that’s deliberate so we can appear to have made the effort or whether it’s just bad management, but in this case, as with so many others down through the years, it flopped like a fish on the line. I am not comforted by the idea that they might get it right next time, and especially not after we’ve given them our money again.