The Reality Of Celtic’s Position Can No Longer Be Denied. Now It Has To Be Dealt With.

Sometimes there are no words. Sometimes none are necessary. Unfortunately, I’m not in a position where things can go unsaid.

The nature of this job means finding the words even when that isn’t easy and sometimes it means saying things you don’t particularly want to say. Especially on a night like this, when I want to forget Celtic even exists and tune in to something else.

But that’s a cop-out and I won’t do it..

Recently, I watched an incredible film on Netflix; Society Of The Snow.

It’s remarkable, the story of the rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountain range and who survived appalling conditions in a white hell-scape for two months before two of the party walked across mountains to find help. It’s inspiring, and it’s a reminder of what we can do as human beings even when things seem at their most grim.

So it’s no surprise that I feel curiously detached from anger and even disappointment tonight, that I actually just want to put this aside for a while and not think about Celtic. I’ve reached the point where part of my brain knows that we’re a better team than this, that Rodgers is a better manager than he’s showing and that there’s a long way to go … but a deeper part of me understands that those things ultimately might not matter.

And I sense that the part of me which already said in these blogs already this season that this one was starting to unravel was way ahead of the part which wanted to hope for a happy ending.

I don’t like getting up every day and being pessimistic, but I’d be kidding if I denied that the leaden feeling in my gut that we’re watching an unfolding disaster has been there this whole time and hadn’t gone away. I’ve tried optimism; if you’ve read the recent pieces you know I stuck with it even after a lot of other people had chucked it.

I still hope for a happy ending. I even see a road by which we might pull it off, but in the parlance o US electoral politics, the paths towards victory are closing off one at a time. It’s no longer obvious how we’re going to get there. I am not convinced our rivals are that good, but I’ve never been completely convinced we had it in us, and all they have to do to win it now is what I’ve always accused our board of doing … they only have to be one step ahead of a team which hasn’t just taken a backwards step but is falling over its own feet.

So, I realise now that just as some of those boys in the Andes early on realised that it was crazy to hope for a rescue that very obviously wasn’t going to come and started to mentally prepare for what they might have to do in order to survive, I realise I’ve already been mentally preparing myself for a day just like this, and I know that because of the emotions that aren’t there.

One of the analogies I’ve used in previous pieces, at other times, concerns a chapter in Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum Of All Fears called Three Shakes.

The entire chapter takes place over the aforementioned “three shakes” – a span of time measuring milliseconds. It describes the mechanics of a nuclear explosion and if that sounds hopelessly geeky then I assure you it is and that you’re right, but it’s always been interesting to me because, of course, that complex series of reactions leads to one momentous outcome and because Clancy ends the chapter by saying that in strictly scientific terms everything that will happen has happened already … in other words, that’s the explosion.

Everything which happens next flows directly from it. The main event has already finished. All that comes afterwards are consequences.

That’s where we are right now.

The sequence of mistakes and misjudgements and the internal mechanisms which will decide this title have already happened, and that’s the worst realisation of all but strangely enough it’s also the knowledge that enables me to detach somewhat from tonight. We can blame individual errors from the boss and from the players, and we can pick our scapegoats but the truth is that the explosion has already happened and we’re now seeing the effects.

We’re where we deserve to be and where this season has been heading since the summer transfer window shut. We got one chance to alter its trajectory and wasted it.

But we’re here because of the choices the people who run Celtic have made, and those choices were made a while ago. Today has been inevitable since Mark Lawwell was brought to this club to enact the strategy Daddy and his cronies had decided on. The average cost of a player in this Celtic team is about £2 million. There is no quality in depth.

The manager was doomed from the moment he sat and told the media that he would work with what they gave him. That was the moment that started the detonation and we’ve been watching the slow motion version of it. The closure of the January window and the fury we all felt was the last of the Three Shakes. And there’s no further point in trusting to hope.

These people have not allowed Rodgers to build his own team. They’ve thrown random players at him and told him to do something with them … no manager could do it. It’s not just incoherent, it’s self destructive, and we’re now locked in because the window’s shut, there is no further mechanism open to us to change course … and now the consequences are all that are left.

And whilst I’ll hope for the best I’m mentally resigned to the worst now.

I’m mentally adapting to the idea that this season is gone … and you know what? I can do that, I can let this go, because when you are in the midst of a disaster and you know help isn’t coming you can start to deal with the reality of it and that reality is that we either start thinking about how we can save ourselves – in short how we can save next season, realising that it’s too late for this one and that we’re going to have to deal with a lot of appalling consequences from that … or we can write off the next one as well and God knows what after that.

In terms of the here and now, if this season goes the way it’s looking the manager cannot possibly survive and his will be the first head to roll, and he’ll deserve it for leaving his future and this campaign in the hands of people who think they are beyond reproach and won’t ever be held to account – more on that tomorrow, you better believe it.

But our problems, and they are big problems, don’t start at his office door and they certainly do not finish there. The rain is coming. It’s not yet here, but we better start building the ark. If we wait for it we can kiss off more than just this title.