Celtic Must Avoid The Kind Of Hubris That Has Led To Embarrassment Across The City.

Earlier on, I wrote about Lawwell and how he should be removed from his role as chairman, all the better for this club to move on. I was thinking, afterwards, about the standard argument which is deployed against us whenever we’ve made a “Lawwell signing” and I realised that there’s an analogy I wanted to deploy and had forgotten; when it came to writing this piece, I thought that it might fit in nicely with the overall theme here.

There is an old Chinese proverb which goes something like this; a farmer and his son own a horse on which their business depends. One day it runs away. The neighbour comes over and says “That’s awfully bad luck about the horse.” The farmer shakes his head and says “It’s toon soon to tell, we’ll see.” So, a day later, the horse comes back … only three other horses have followed it. So instead of one horse he now has four. The neighbour comes back over and says “Well done on the horses! That’s tremendous.” The farmer shakes his head and says “It’s too soon to tell, we’ll see.” A few days later, the farmer’s son is trying to tame one of the horses, and as it resists him, he falls off and breaks his leg and his arm. The neighbour comes rushing over “Oh dear! Your poor son! What bad luck!” The farmer shakes his head and says, “Too soon to tell, we’ll see.” A few days after that, the army comes riding through town looking to recruit all the able-bodied kids for their latest war, and they get to the farmhouse, check out the son and leave without him because he’s not fit to fight. The neighbour comes rushing back over. “What great news about your son! You must be so relieved.” The farmer looks at him, shakes his head and says, “We’ll see. It’s too soon to tell.”

And that’s what life is like as a Celtic fan sometimes. If we’re taking the long-term view (which is really what the proverb is about) we can’t judge anything on its immediate impact. We always have to be looking a little further down the track. As I said, this is the argument that is deployed against those of us who have criticised the summer business; “we’ll see, it’s too soon to tell.” Which will be a lot of consolation to us if we lose this title, that these guys might, at some point, prove to have been worth the money after all.

But in the here and now, most of them have contributed nothing, and their impact on this race can easily be gauged and judged. The question we still have to ask ourselves is this; has it had the kind of impact which costs us the title?

Last night, the Ibrox club dropped points for the third consecutive game; it is clear that they are in a bad place right now, with players off form and others so deep in their own heads that they can barely see straight. Which is to say nothing for the tremendous mess their manager is getting himself into with those increasingly deranged press statements.

That’s perfect. That’s where we want them. That’s how any club would want a rival to be in a close title race which is entering its latter stages. Too good to be true in some ways.

So, is the title ours? “We’ll see. Too early to tell.”

And if we do win the title, is next season all mapped out in front of us, and putting us on the right footing for the future? “Too early to tell. We’ll see.”

The truth is, our own form has been so patchy that we can’t take anything to the bank. One game at a time is as far ahead as we should be aiming to look. It is definitely too early to tell if we’ll be champions, although there are just five league games left.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m confident. Very. I have been for many months, since Rodgers changed the style and released Kyogo all over again. I think we will be celebrating a double.

But the league won’t properly be decided until they leave Celtic Park on the back of a shattering loss. If that happens, we’re champions as we’d need to lose both the remaining matches and they’d have to overturn the goal difference into the bargain.

They are looking out on their feet, but we aren’t looking too clever ourselves at times. The first half display against St Mirren was a warning as to what can still go wrong, and whilst we redeemed ourselves in the second, we’d have all preferred to see a more even performance where we dominated for the whole of the match instead of blowing them away in 45 minutes.

Say we win the league? What then? Everything’s golden with the club, right? We can start looking forward to next season and the Champions League in its bizarre new format. Good, eah? Except … maybe. “Too early to tell. We’ll see.”

There’s an obvious risk here. It’s that Rodgers wins this title, the board looks at the squad and decides that he is a miracle worker who can buy on a limited budget outside of what we bring in for sales. That would weaken the team further before he could do the actual work of making it stronger. Frustratingly, I think this is a very real prospect.

The risk with these guys is always that they want a manager to do more with less. Every high value player is at risk of being shipped out and replaced with a project, and the better a Celtic manager is performing the greater the risk of that is … it is a perverse situation, but we keep on doing this again and again and again.

We need to keep holding the club’s feet to the fire on these issues. We cannot forever be doing a variation of “Too early to tell. We’ll see.” There is no certainty in football – that’s why we love the game, after all – but we want to know that we’re doing our best. The biggest risk here isn’t even that we low-ball it and go cheap … it’s that we get arrogant and complacent.

Ibrox’s hubris is why they are here. They pushed to get the biggest wage bill in the country because they convinced themselves that this would make a difference. But they keep on falling over their own feet. The problem our board has is that it’s been getting lucky on that for a long, long time. We rely not so much on what we get right but on what they get wrong.

And we cannot keep doing that. Their club is a mess because they believe that simply spending money, no matter what they get for it, will put them ahead of the teams they need to beat to win the league. Look at the signing of Silva.

Nobody will tell me that anyone from their club ever actually watched him play; that guy is as complete a waste of money as you will ever see. Why did they bring him to the club, even on loan, and make him their highest paid player, perhaps even more so than the keeper? They assumed, I think, that even a player who has flopped majorly in the EPL must be better than the standard SPFL dross. And he really isn’t.

Their arrogance is off the charts. Arrogance is what we want to avoid, and yet I think it characterised our summer signings. Lawwell Jnr probably believed that these guys would be better than the domestic opposition. Rodgers, with his experience, knew better. And these people ignored him anyway. They completely ran down his opinions.

Let’s not forget; we spent good money in the summer. Yes, we ended the window with a trading surplus and no net spend, but that matters less to me than what the money we did spend bought us. Nothing worth writing home about is the short answer. But people inside the club relied too much on their own criteria and their own judgement … and on Ibrox continuing to be a shambles. That’s what the “projects” strategy is based on; on having a good enough team to beat the SPFL level dross and hope that the guru manager can beat the Ibrox club.

Which is why even in the event we win this title, we might not automatically be set up for the next campaign unless we stop thinking about things in those terms.

At some point their club will get its act together; it almost has to. It cannot keep cycling through constant crisis. They need a better overall strategy; they need to commit to development and building something even if that means that they spend several years without challenging us … but at some stage someone over there is going to twig that stuff and then we better get real.

I believe in this team. I believe in this manager. I believe we’ve got the good to win this title from this position, and that we will. But it’s not over until we’ve put the points on the board, and I am still very nervous. I am nervous about the implications of succeeding as well as failing because with this board you just never know what that will lead to.

We cannot afford complacency or arrogance. Winning this title will still require us to win five games out of five, I think … and beyond that, we can’t think that just making the Groups is enough. Next season’s setup gives us opportunities, both in terms of co-efficient points and cold hard cash. But we need to take it seriously and do better in terms of the signings.

Anything else would be hubris … and that brings trouble. So right now we need to focus on the job at hand and treat every game like a cup final. Do that, and we’ll be in a good position to move forward. To move forward, Celtic, not stand still. That’s the other mistake we keep making.