The Ibrox Board Says It Will Give Clement Time, But They Know That’s Not A Credible Position.

Tomorrow I’m going to go over the John Bennett statement in a bit of detail. I know I said that yesterday, but it’s nothing that won’t keep.

I was amazed by it. I continue to be amazed by it.

What I am amazed by is not that in some areas all he does is waffle and dissemble. When it comes to the stadium, his “update” is abysmal, a complete failure to properly articulate a message. The message itself, that the club has no clarity to offer, is equally bad.

No, what amazes me about it is the areas where he does provide clarity and even honesty, and honesty at that club is rare and in short supply. But when he talks about the club no longer being willing, or able, to keep pouring money down the bottomless pit he is at least facing reality and making the first tentative effort to get the fans to do the same.

When he spoke about Clement being fully committed to the cause, and in alignment with the broad strokes of the new transfer policy, that’s where he spun off into something that if it was not quite fiction certainly wasn’t rooted in hard fact and logic. Clement has expressed his disaffection with the situation he finds himself in, and that’s just the first of the obvious contradictions. More noteworthy even than that was when he talked about giving the manager time.

This is a subject we talk about a lot on here, how the shelf life of an Ibrox boss has been reducing steadily until it’s now being measured in months, not years. At some point, yes, they do have to give someone time to put his mark on the club … but they are still a long way from the recalibration it would take for them to do that.

Theirs is a fan-base which is only now having to confront the truth of what Celtic is compared to their own club. They are very reluctant to accept what it is that they are hearing now from the people on their board of directors. Nobody wants to hear that their club is opting for life in the slow-lane, and the understanding that goes with that, that even a domestic challenge is going to be difficult whilst everyone adapts to that new reality.

Celtic is hamstrung by a board which has set itself narrow parameters and is incapable of thinking outside of them. But we get one thing right, more often than not; the man in the dugout. And because we get that right, we’re successful even within those confines, and because the man in the dugout can sometimes find something in a player which takes them to a new level, we are usually starting from a pretty high water mark.

Even if all we do in this window is sign Bernardo and, if we stop messing about, Adam Idah, and provided we don’t do something daft and sell O’Riley without buying a goalscoring midfielder to replace him, we’ll have something resembling the squad that won last season’s title. That will, in all probability, be too strong for Ibrox as it was last year.

Foundationally, the squad is usually solid enough to get us through the domestic campaign. We still have a core of high value players. To beat us, Ibrox needs the same and they don’t have that at the moment and their board now acknowledges that they don’t know where the money to sign those players is coming from.

Provided we don’t turbo-charge the downsizing and get shot of O’Riley, Kyogo, Maeda and Hatate all in a short space of time without replacing them – not inconceivable since we’ve lost Jota, Abada, Giakoumakis and Starfelt and not replaced them – we will remain good enough to see off the domestic threat. That’s where our club is in relation to theirs.

They acknowledge this, or at least their board now does. The fans … they’re a long way from embracing the truth and dealing with it on its own terms.

We have done what we were always going to be able to do as long as we kept winning leagues; we’ve exhausted them. They’ve tried several times to throw money at this problem in the hope of overhauling us and nothing has worked, and like a long-distance runner who has pushed every ounce of energy out of his limbs and his organs, they’re spent, they’re beaten, there’s nothing left in the tank and the finish line is right in front of us.

Bennett has at least told them that it’s useless trying to keep pace.

When you’re in that position, what do you do? The only way to solve it is to be smarter and more ruthless and focussed than ever before, and that takes time, and it means making sacrifices in the here and the now.

This is the last thing their fans are prepared to accept and especially with Celtic so close to rendering the Survival Lie redundant by threatening to overhaul their “record”. The chances that we’ll hit the much vaunted “56” before them is so realistic a prospect now that their forums vibrate with fury at the very idea of it, and we’re on the brink if we win this one.

Under those circumstances, the fans won’t give Clement time and because they won’t the club can’t. Bennett talks about the long-term view, but to get there they need to take the fans with them, and without that there’s no prospect of success whatever path they choose, and there would need to be a complete sea-change in their mentality to accept sticking with a failing manager.

And all this presumes, of course, that he’s happy to stick around to do a long-term rebuild with an uncertain outcome in the first place. The Ibrox club is his fifth since 2017, which does not suggest that he has the remotest interest in doing a legacy building job whilst his CV is put through the shredder. Even if the club was willing, even if the fans were content, the chances are that he’ll be looking for the exit door long before he finishes a restructuring on that scale.

So that’s the part of Bennett’s statement which might be more interesting than all the rest of it put together. He has made a vow on the manager, and backing him, and sticking by him that he knows he cannot possibly hold to without risking a death spiral where fans stop buying tickets and the cutting goes in to overdrive and even more fans stop going to games.

This is why a Celtic strategy built on chaining ourselves to their fortunes is the mark of insanity. What happens if their destructive spiral becomes a death spiral?

Do we lock ourselves into extreme downsizing to avoid moving even further ahead? This is the flaw in the argument, this has always been the flaw in it.

They are perfectly capable of slipping deeper into crisis whether we make a conscious decision to leave them behind or not … we could find ourselves downsizing to a level where they should still be competitive only for them to fall off the cliff anyway.

And where does that leave us if they do?

Our best option – I think our only option when you see the state they are in – is to cut them loose, because a drag on us is all they are, and to push for that next rung on the ladder in Europe.

That’s where the future is, where the money is, where the glory is. At the moment they give up trying to keep pace we have two options; to sit down in the road until they catch up or to pick up speed and leave them where they lie.

They are caught in their spiral of destruction. We do not have to stay in it with them.

This morning I appeared on the Graham Spiers podcast to discuss this window. You can listen to it below.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-is-celtics-109169700