There Are Just Hours To Go And Celtic Continues To Scramble Around For Signings.

The news isn’t great at the moment. In fact, there’s no news.

There are now less than seven hours to go and we’re where this website and a few others feared we would be with the business being left so late; watching the clock and racing against it instead of sitting pretty with everything in hand.

In spite of what some people might think, there is nothing fun or exciting about last day business. It’s just stupid. This should be just another day for our club, not one fraught with tension and which almost always ends in extreme disappointment. The idea that it’s hard to get business done early is ridiculous. It’s much harder to get it done right now.

Clubs and agents know where you are going into the last day. When every newspaper and blog in this country was screaming about our need for a striker and a left back you can bet your bottom dollar that any club we approached would have known it too.

Clubs who at the start of the window might have been willing to sell for a reasonable fee know that in the closing stages they can chisel even more money out of you because the stink of desperation is wafting off you. It is certainly come off Celtic in waves.

Nobody can think this is a good way to run a club. These aren’t throwaway priorities; these are critical parts of the squad which we had to sign in this window and the failure to bring in quality of the sort we needed is deplorable.

We’ve already accepted the utter mediocrity of the striker choice – not the player, we don’t know about the player, but the amateurishness of waiting this long to bring a Norwich academy player on a loan without an option to buy – and most of us fear the worst on the left back, if we can even get one in. But the clock is ticking and optimism is fading with it.

The news that we’re also chasing a midfielder now should fill me with a bit of pleasure because I did say this morning that with Turnbull leaving, we need one, but when you leave it this long there is very little chance that you are going to be able to bring in quality.

I have no confidence that we will because the striker and left back positions were critical and we aren’t bringing in quality there. The midfielder will probably be another loan; another problem to fix this summer. We’re setting ourselves up for a huge job then, and based on our way of doing things it will probably be transfer revenue neutral if we’re lucky … in short, depending on selling at least one key player to fund it in spite of the financial position we’re in.

It’s just left five. There are six and a half hours left, and this unseemly scrambling makes us look ridiculous and sums up the complete lunacy of our approach.