As Celtic Prepares For The Final In Calm Silence, Ibrox Gets The Todd Cantwell Show.

Looking in from the outside, I would hate to be sharing an Ibrox dressing room with Todd “Tik-Tok” Cantwell and some of his chums.

Whenever you hear someone at Celtic in the media, the focus is all on the team, the unit, the single entity which just won the title and is attempting now to win the double. You rarely, if ever, see someone at Celtic so obviously out for himself.

At Ibrox, individualism is the order of the day. That club has no notion of what it means to behave as a team. You have a collection of players who are obsessed with self-promotion to the cost of everything else. Silva and Cantwell are only the most visible examples, but their captain is another one who has an over-blown view of his abilities.

Aside from the fact that Celtic is a unit, and that its squad behaves like one, there is no attention seeking whatsoever except where it belongs; on the pitch. That’s why our club does not generate so many headlines as the one across the city. They ought to have their own soap opera, and with a cup final to prepare for the Todd Cantwell Show is the last thing they needed.

Dealing with this guy and the constant circus around him must be like trying to sleep for a night shift with a kids birthday party going on in the same room. And one obnoxious little sod keeping putting ice cream on your face when you shut your eyes and just start nodding off.

Once again, he will be the focus of headlines and attention when everyone over there just wants to get on with preparing for the game. There is talk that he spent the day in a luxury hotel bar … surely not, you’d think, but can you really rule that out when it’s this guy?

Their fans would put nothing past him, and the manager clearly has serious concerns about his mentality.

Cantwell comes across like a complete egomaniac. And that’s not a good thing to have in a team, especially when it needs to come together and act like one. We see a public side of him which is bad enough; can you imagine what his fellow players have to put up with in private? If that dressing room over there has splits, odds-on he’s part of the problem.

The thing of it is, he does possess a modicum of talent, but his head is all over the place and his attitude stinks. He’s just the sort of player you dream of sitting at the centre of your rivals’ dressing room, causing disruption, breeding resentment, and Celtic players like Callum McGregor will have a ball winding this guy up on Saturday if, that is, he even gets near their starting eleven.

Which he might very well do, because they are going to be short of players who are fully fit. Which places Clement in one Hell of a quandary as he doesn’t trust this guy at all and has dropped him for several of their big games in this campaign.

It won’t matter either way, I don’t think. Cantwell is a symptom of the wider malaise that grips that whole club. He would be considered an oddball and embarrassment if he was at Celtic, and he would be dispatched in the next available transfer window … but there he is just a small part of a bigger picture, which gets messier the closer you look.

All at Celtic have every right to be confident without being complacent. What a shambles they are across the city. What a wonderful evolving disaster it is.