No Celtic Manager Would Have Accepted The Appalling Behaviour Of Fabio Silva.

In my time, I have seen good Celtic managers and bad ones.

Tactical geniuses and complete novices.

I have seen good men who were too nice for the job, and ruthless men who were just as ruthless when it came to walking out on it.

It would be madness to claim that we know all that much about what a Celtic manager may or may not do, but I do feel like there are places where one might draw the line.

We saw where that line was at the weekend.

When The Green Brigade saw the team off at the weekend, in what was an excellent showcase of what it is that they do so well and to the great benefit of the club, I had one quibble; I fundamentally disagreed with their banner which read By Any Means Necessary.

I read that and thought “Any means?”

Would I want us to resort to cheating if that’s what it took?

And the answer is no, I wouldn’t have welcomed that.

In case I was in the least doubt how I felt I watched one of the most appalling showcases for football’s dark arts that you could ever have hoped not to witness against your own club, from Fabio Silva in the game itself. If that’s what “by any means necessary” looks like, you can keep it.

Had he done that in our colours, I would have been thoroughly embarrassed and disgusted by it and heartily ashamed of his conduct. I would not have wanted to see him in a Celtic shirt again.

But more importantly, I don’t believe that Brendan Rodgers would have found behaviour like that in the least bit acceptable from one of our players, and especially not when the player in question contributed not one positive thing to the occasion. Because that’s all he done in the match; he deceived the officials to win a penalty kick.

I am scanning my memory for a single time when a Celtic player has turned in a display like that and I cannot come up with a single one.

It was not just Silva’s dive for the penalty … he rolled around as if he’d been shot whenever a player went near him. The footage of it is cringe inducing. It was abysmal, desperate stuff. It was the kind of shady behaviour the media should be in uproar over.

The low-key response to it from the press tells its own story. More telling, by far, is the complete lack of condemnation or even something so prosaic as mild disquiet from his own manager. That Silva even came out for the second half tells you what Clement is prepared to tolerate.

Look at the behaviour of the rest of his team, in addition to that; crowding the referee at the penalty in an effort to get Johnston sent off when all of them knew it wasn’t even a foul.

And they did that consistently, even wanting Scales booked as early as the third minute, for a nothing incident which got them a free kick.

That their manager hasn’t said a single word about any of it makes you wonder if they haven’t been instructed to do this stuff by the boss himself, you know, this guy who has the media eating out of his hand.

I listened to him at the end of the game, and every word that came out of his mouth was delusional clap-trap, the sort of things that had Rodgers said them would have had the whole press corps writing for the next week about how he was starting to fragment.

Moral victory? Proving that they were the better side?

His record against Rodgers is played two lost one and drew one, and everything he said about “the real” version of his team showing up in the second half was identical to the rubbish he talked when he lost at our ground at New Years.

He had home advantage here, a referee who should never have been near that fixture (and who even in the best interpretation, the one the media seems determined to put on events, had three key decisions to make and got every one of them wrong until VAR reversed them), a 100% partisan crowd and enough hype behind them to more than make up for the wind.

If his team were all that, he could have virtually ended the league race on Sunday … that he now has to come to Celtic Park where the complete reverse will be true (everything but the ref; we can forget about that) must be eating away at his insides. He knows they made a real mess of this; he knows that this is now in our hands rather than in his.

The words “any means necessary” wholly apply to that club and to their coach.

For all the men who have managed this club over the years have had different personalities and outlooks, not one of them would have allowed one of our players to behave in the disgraceful way that Fabio Silva did at the weekend, nor stayed silent about it afterwards.