Celtic Needs To Be Careful Not To Fall Into An Embarrassing Transfer Trap Like Ibrox Just Did.

The talk today of Adam Idah and Paolo Bernardo is interesting but not terribly important. I’m clear that I’d like to see Idah back at the club, but that’s because he’s a known quality and has proved that he can do it in the team. What’s more important is that we bring in someone of that ilk, someone with those qualities, and that we do it swiftly.

The window is not open yet, so in fact we’re not in a great hurry here. There will be plenty of time for this, but the sooner we start the sooner the manager can start making his plans for the summer and for the start of training. The two are possibilities, that’s all.

Idah generated some headlines yesterday for his social media farewell. It was a slow news day, I guess, because there’s nothing even slightly controversial or newsworthy in what he did. His contract at Celtic is up, he’s not our player, and he cannot act as if he is or that move to Celtic is in any way certain. It is not. The new boss at Norwich might want him.

They might set a ludicrously high fee – Chris Sutton should actually hang his head in shame for his own clownish contribution to this; he’s talking about £9 million now for a player he slated, yes absolutely slated, when we signed him, and just as he’s done with Rodgers, he’s reversed gear in a way that would have had Hugh Keevins beaming with pleasure.

Both Idah and Celtic have been careful because we’re still dealing here with a lot of unknowns and whatever faults I might have with the transfer strategy itself I have no issues whatsoever with how we go about our getting our business done; quietly, professionally, usually without leaks until we know that the deals are on the brink of being concluded.

Whether we like it or not – and I have no real issue with it per se – there are a handful of the hacks who actually are connected to events at Parkhead and when they write something you can pretty much take it to the bank as having come from inside the club. I will be looking out for their names above articles, and won’t take much seriously without it.

What we need to be careful about – and we are careful about it – is that we don’t get caught in a negative news cycle of “Celtic snubbed” stories. The media tries every year, but very little of it cuts through because most of the time they are dealing in speculation anyway. If Idah is priced too highly we’ve move on. If they don’t want to sell him we’ll move on. That’s how it’s going to work, and we’re too smart to start banging the drum for a deal that might not happen.

The Ibrox club has suffered just such a humiliation this afternoon, and they’ve dealt with it by trying to spin it. This morning the talk was all about how a deal for Cordobo, the Panamanian defender playing in Bulgaria was just about over the line and The Record and others were falling over themselves to talk about how good he is; a player, by the way, who none of them knows the first thing about except what you can find online.

But that deal is now dead, and the story broke first in France with a journalist close to the action who claimed that he’s snubbed Ibrox and is now on the brink of moving to Norwich. The Record then had to write an article about that, expressing it as a shock, before Ibrox did what it nearly always has to resort to doing when these situations arise; they lied.

Thankfully for them they have willing idiots ready to take their lies forward for them, and Chris Jack, whose newspaper pays him a salary although he is, in fact, little more than an Ibrox shill, ran their version of the story that it was the club who had walked away from the deal. Yeah, Chris, was that before or after the player himself said he was moving to England?

That question will forever go unasked, far less unanswered, but this is what Ibrox does. In its desire to give the fans some happy news and to prop up the rubbish I wrote about this morning – that next season it’ll all be different – they made sure to give this guy a public tour of the ground and the training facilities, they made sure the media knew the deal was in motion and they got their PR lackies to do the groundwork selling him as a superstar.

And now they want their own fans to believe that they are the ones who had a change of heart. Rather than sitting and waiting to see what developed whilst the deal progressed in the background quietly, they have made a public spectacle of it … and now they’ve been publicly snubbed into the bargain whilst they scramble around trying to deny that.

Still, it hasn’t taught them a damned thing because they’ve accompanied their transparent cover story with yet another transfer leak!

“Oh, we’ve moved on to Plan B” and they’ve leaked the name as to who Plan B is … an Argentine defender who has interest from Europe. So, no sooner has one transfer bid ended in embarrassment but they are teeing up the next one at the same time … what have I said about that club and message discipline, or the lack thereof?

We have much more professionalism, and even when we don’t get the business right we go about that business in a disciplined way … which is why we should ignore the rumours and wait for actual news, and there won’t be actual news until the club is just about ready to announce it. That club across town can humiliate itself as much as it likes.

We won’t make the same mistake.