Forget Protesting At Hampden. Celtic Fans Should Be Protesting On Their Own Doorstep.

Celtic was cheated on the pitch at the weekend. Celtic was cheated inside the walls of Hampden the other day when we lost the Yang appeal after the SFA had already publicly given Beaton a vote of confidence by pencilling him in for a Scottish Cup Quarter Final.

And they rubbed our face in it when they decided to schedule a hearing for Rodgers timed so that he will almost certainly miss the game at Ibrox.

I understand the impulse some feel to take our frustrations out on the governing body.

But in fact, as I said at the weekend, at least some of the blame for this lies at the doors of Celtic Park, and if we’re going to protest, I would suggest starting there and not on the doorsteps of Hampden. Our biggest problems since this season began have been inside our own walls, and nothing that happened at the weekend substantially changes that.

I wrote earlier about the Fans Forum meeting, and Nicholson’s answers to some of the questions which were posed on this issue. The club is content with things as they are. If they weren’t they would be putting together a proposal and touring the newsrooms with it, in order to get the debate started and put other clubs on the spot with their own fans.

Celtic remains a club hobbled by mediocrity and fear, and that has resulted in a number of self-inflicted wounds.

A Brendan Rodgers team would have turned around a match with ten men in his first spell here, but this is not a Brendan Rodgers team, of course, but one where half of the players were signed by the previous boss and the other half by a recruitment team which ignored his own very clear brief, and whose departmental head has already been shuffled sideways out the door to avoid bloodletting further up the ladder.

But we would be mugs to settle for that.

This league race should be out of sight.

It shouldn’t even be in the hands of the officials; we should have seen to that months ago. The January window was the last proper opportunity to fix the glaring issues with this team. The recruitment department failed in the most spectacular fashion and we have shipped no fewer than seven points since it closed. We cannot blame only the officials for that.

We’re allowed Alexander Bernabei to leave yesterday; why? For what possible gain to this club? The people who are running Celtic right now are living on a different planet if they think that’s an appropriate act when there are only nine games left.

This goes back deeper though.

It’s a much bigger issue that just the steady, reckless weakening of this squad.

Their failures go beyond that.

There can’t be a single person at Celtic Park who isn’t fully aware that refereeing in this game is a scandal. We should have brought proposals to the table many years ago and put them in the public domain to start the national discussion on this, regardless of how that discussion would initially play itself out, which is to say that the media would hate it and want to torch it … but clubs and fans would sit up and pay attention and we’d get somewhere.

Last night I posted a piece on some of the excuses which are made by those in the media as to why we can’t have change. Nobody can present a rational, coherent case for continuing with the current system, only excuses for not taking action.

Unfortunately, that extends to our own club.

We are bereft of genuine leaders.

I am writing a piece for later in the week about Fergus McCann; can you even imagine what he would do faced with some of this?

A man like that would have driven through these people in a tank over what we’ve had to watch unfold over the last couple of seasons. He would have fought our corner on every front.

I don’t want to write too much about him today because I want that wider article to fully reflect the respect I have for him and the gratitude I feel for his achievements, but we all know that he would not have permitted some of what we’ve witnessed since 2012.

I also wonder what John Reid would have done.

He’s one of those guys the armchair rebels despise, and largely over stuff he had very little to do with, and their view of him is, in my opinion, a clear sign of how short-sighted they are; Reid was a warrior on Celtic’s behalf.

He was the last figure of real gravitas who sat in that boardroom and had he still been chairman when Rangers collapsed, I genuinely believe that Scottish football would look very different.

This board needs to grow a little backbone, but I don’t think they have it in them.

It’s just one of a number of areas where they have failed us, and that failure now casts a giant shadow over what is left of this season.

It is not inconceivable that this title race might be decided by the officials, and if it is we should be as angry with those inside Celtic as those who snipe at us from Hampden.