Ibrox Fans Have Mikey Johnston Syndrome. Celtic Fans Know How That Ends.

Today has been one of those strange days.

Looking across the city towards Ibrox, one thing that stands out is the constant backtracking that goes on over there, which the media seems to overlook, and their fans would prefer not to acknowledge. But it’s glaringly evident in many of the comments circulating on their social media, fan sites, and forums that some of them are worried about the calibre of players they’ll be left with when the transfer window closes.

The title of this article has been deliberately chosen to provoke their supporters. But I could have called it many different things, and it would still have achieved that goal because there’s nothing here that isn’t going to be true.

While we’re sitting here, assessing the shaky foundations on which our manager must build a Champions League campaign at Celtic, they’re facing a much grimmer situation.

Senior and important players from their squad over the last three or four years are leaving, and they won’t be replaced. There’s a lot of what we won’t even call “talent” departing their club, and very little is coming in to replace it.

But experience doesn’t automatically equate to quality, and we know that as well as anyone.

This is where I re-iterate, again, that I am not criticising Alex Valle, who we’re on the brink of signing on loan.

We’ve signed inexperienced players who turned out to have tremendous potential and have gone on to become fabulous players. Conversely, we’ve also signed the odd Thomas Gravesen, players with all the experience in the world who simply can’t do it anymore. My issue is that for a Champions League campaign, the manager – not me, the boss – explicitly wanted quality and experience.

This isn’t going to be about that, or an article criticising Mikey Johnston.

But Mikey Johnston is a classic example of a phenomenon they know all too well.

Some of us clung too long to the fantasy that Johnston can still be a top-class player, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But there is a need to believe that as long as he’s here, a miracle could still happen.

So, every time he has a good game for us, or while on loan, the same question arises: Does he have a future at Celtic? We all know the answer is no, but people like to cling to hope.

The reason we can afford to indulge this fantasy is that Mikey doesn’t play a critical role at the club. He’s not asked to play every week, perform miracles, or win us major games. We know better than to trust Mikey with those kinds of responsibilities because we know he can’t handle them.

Across the city, when this window opened, the plan was to clear out the deadwood—to get rid of the big-earning underachievers like Tavernier, Dessers, and Matondo.

Yet, somehow, these players aren’t just surviving the cull—they’re apparently the foundation upon which the coach is trying to build a winning side! That they were trying to sell them all as recently as a week ago hardly seems to matter. One win has changed everything.

They have their own Mikey Johnston’s over there, except their versions play every week and once in a blue moon they show a spark of something. And because they show something once in a blue moon, all is forgiven.

I can scarcely believe some of the headlines today about Clement wanting to build the team around Matondo, Dessers, and Tavernier—serial flops and failures.

If you were to ask me if I’d choose Mikey Johnston or Rabbi Matondo for the Celtic team, it would be Johnston all day, every day. Seven days a week, 365 days a year, without question. Matondo has pace, sure, but so does a Sauchiehall Street purse snatcher.

They know these guys aren’t worth keeping, and we know they know that the only reason they’re talking about building a team around them is that they have no choice—no one else wants them. Yet, everyone’s going along with the charade, as if it isn’t just another way to guarantee another season of crushing disappointment and heartbreak.

Some of you might remember that I recently wrote a piece on the late John le Carré’s fabulous book, The Tailor of Panama, and the great movie adapted from it, starring Pierce Brosnan as Andy Osnard, an MI6 agent.

Osnard, disgraced but unashamed, is exiled to the tiny country as punishment for his indiscretions. He finds in ex-con Harry Pendel, the titular tailor, his inside man, feeding him the goings-on and naughty deeds of Panamanian high society, including plans for the crucial trading route through the canal.

Osnard takes Pendel’s intelligence to the top brass. Even though he knows it’s nonsense, and they know it’s nonsense, it keeps getting passed up the ranks until it’s left London to end up in Washington, where they also must know it’s dubious but continue to act as if it were real.

Everyone knows it’s all lies. Everyone knows none of it is credible, but everyone—from Pendel to Osnard, to Osnard’s bosses, to the top brass in London, to the generals and politicians in Washington—everyone is playing an angle.

Everyone has something to gain from treating the information seriously and behaving as if it’s real.

That’s what’s happening here. There’s a lot of mutual back-scratching, and many people are playing along because they have no choice. These players aren’t going anywhere. Cantwell and Hagi are already languishing in the reserves, contributing nothing.

They can’t afford to have too many more players doing that, and they certainly can’t afford to do it with their captain and top goal-scorer.

So, everyone involved is trying to convince themselves that an emphatic win over a lowly Ross County team represents real progress and proves that these guys are top players, even though everyone knows that’s not true.

There’s a bit of Mikey Johnston syndrome here, but more than that, there’s Andy Osnard syndrome—people lying to themselves and each other.

And it’s going to do is blow up in their faces the first time they suffer a poor result in which Matondo shows how little he’s worth, Dessers shows how little composure he actually has, and then the fuming on the forums will start all over again.

The rage and the anger, feeding the loathing, will course through the place, and the manager will get it in the neck, even though he didn’t believe in these players in the first place.

But this is Ibrox to a T.

The same thing happens with managers as it does with players. Clement gets a good result, and suddenly, he’s the second coming again.

Until he isn’t.

The Who released a great song called “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and in it, there’s the classic and famous line: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

It’s the same players over there—meet the new Dessers, same as the old Dessers.

As if they don’t get it—these guys just aren’t going to get any better.

But when they have no choice but to get behind something, they find a way to bend their minds around any corner, over any obstacle, and to pretend for a while that everything will be fine, even when they know it’s not and it won’t be. It was ever thus.

Don’t ever change, guys. Don’t ever change.