Kyogo’s Japanese Snub Was The Moment The Celtic Board Decided Not To Spend.

If this title race ends with an Ibrox captain lifting the league trophy, our club will be rocked by convulsions so strong that they will risk toppling the statues in the car-park. Rodgers will be the first to go, of course, the sacrificial lamb that the directors hope will spare them the flak. Since none of us should have the least faith in who will replace him, that ought to be dismissed out of hand as any kind of solution as to what ails us.

A lot of people will have their theories on what happened to get us to that point. A lot of people will celebrate Rodgers’ departure as if it were a personal triumph; there are people who simply will not forgive him for leaving the first time and the fact that he’s in the job and needs the support of the fans whilst we’re still in this race doesn’t seem to dawn on them at all.

If I had to offer a moment where this campaign hits the skids, I would take you back to last season and the appointment of Mark Lawwell and, more pointedly, the appoint of Peter Lawwell as chairman at around this time last year.

Peter Lawwell’s presence at the club coincided with the sales of two key players who were stalwarts of Ange’s team; Juranovic and Giakoumakis. Since then, we’ve sold Jota and Starfelt, and we’ve lost Mooy. Five key first team starters. None of them have been replaced with similar quality, including Johnston.

Their “leadership” has been dreadful, and you only to look at the state we got into over the Asian Cup to get a sense of how appalling it has been.

I first wrote about this issue before last season was over, and I spent the summer waiting, in increasingly incredulity, as we failed to take the key precautionary step which were necessary to stop that throwing our season into crisis; the purchase of a top class striker not only to replace those we were bound to lose for that tournament but to actually replace Giakoumakis as proper competition for our starter, as well as offering the manager the maximum number of tactical options for playing different systems.

All through the last few months of the year, we had Rodgers telling us that the Asian Cup had been anticipated and that everything was in hand; those statements were fundamentally untrue. Not only had we not done the necessary work in the summer in terms of signing a striker, but we actually signed three more Asian footballers eligible to take part in that tournament. We increased our exposure instead of trying to limit it.

You will not get a clearer or more obvious example of how incomprehensibly scattershot and random and stupid our summer transfer policy was, and the people responsible for that should all be out of a job as rank incompetents without a clue.

Mark Lawwell, if you believed the hype, not only knew Asian football but had worked in its environs. How, then, it escaped his attention that which any person who watches the game knew – that Japan and South Korea were amongst the favourites and that there was a chance that all of our players from those countries might be away for the whole of the tournament, encompassing tricky away games and two Scottish Cup ties – I cannot fathom.

When our seven point lead started to shrink, I thought that alarm bells would finally be clanging inside Celtic Park about the scale of the risk we were taking. And indeed, that’s when Rodgers started talking about four quality players still being needed and how important the January window was. He assured us that everything was in hand and the plan was in place.

Then Kyogo was left out of the Japan squad, and all of a sudden everything changed, and this blog said at the time that Rodgers’ comments about how that had shifted the priorities was ominous at best and at worst potentially catastrophic. That was the moment our board decided not to properly fund the managers plans, and he was well aware of it.

On 20 January, he admitted as much at a press conference.

Then, with eleven days of the window left, Rodgers gave the game away when he said, “It’s … one that we have been looking at for a period of time and it would have really changed if Kyogo had gone away with Japan. That was our thinking process, that we would actually be left with no one … Him being here for virtually one game a week for a number of weeks changes the dynamic.”

That was the moment I ceased to believe that these people would deliver for the boss or for the team. The writing was on the wall.

They decided there was no need for a striker to be signed. They decided that was no longer a key requirement. It seems likely that they stripped back on the other plans too. That’s what was chosen over chasing a £60 million jackpot in the summer, and that’s not the only fiscal risk they’ve taken here of course.

I’ll get to that subject a little later on.

The winning changes we’d made to the strategy when Ange was in his first campaign were put to the sword the minute Lawwell junior was in the building, and daddy made sure we were back to tight controls even in opposition to the manager’s wishes.

But if you want the exact moment this season when those people took the wilful, conscious decision to gamble, it happened on 1 January, when Kyogo Furuhashi was not selected for Japan.