It’s Firesale Week At Ibrox, Guys, And Everything Must Go.

There are times when the media here is quite funny. Genuinely, I’m not kidding. There are times when they honestly amuse me.

One of the things that most often makes me laugh is when they take a perfectly clear and understandable statement and try to attach some ambiguity or vagueness to it in order to camouflage what it obviously means.

Yesterday, the Ibrox manager spoke to the media after their side’s victory against a hapless opponent in front of a half empty stadium.

He told the press that every player at his club is for sale in the next seven days. Every single player. He also said that he wants to keep Dessers and Matondo—two guys the club has been trying to sell not only for the past week but for the whole summer.

He said the same about the keeper and other players in the team. But what he was also saying, clearly and publicly, in his exact words, is that “you can’t say no to everything.”

There isn’t a single person who listened to that statement who doesn’t know exactly what it means. That statement didn’t come out of the blue like a thunderbolt, shocking everyone with its sudden appearance. It came out of a storm-filled sky, with the rain already teeming down.

Everyone knows that the club is desperate to bring in players and that they cannot do that without moving players out. The more high-profile players they move on and the more money they get for them, the more likely they are to bring in something half-decent.

When he says, “We can’t say no to everything,” what he means is, “We will say yes to virtually anything.” While Celtic talks about Matt O’Riley and how a club has to meet our valuation, their transfer selling strategy is a little bit different.

They’re ringing up clubs and saying, “Please take this guy off our hands. Money doesn’t necessarily have to be involved, but if you can throw us a few quid, that would be appreciated.” This is the equivalent of rattling a tin cup outside the ground.

And the media knows this full well, which is why any attempt to spin it as something else is utterly stupid. Everyone knows what the guy meant. Everyone knows what he was saying. He knows that Dessers, Matondo, and these other guys doing it against the Ross County’s of this world is all well and good. But in terms of carrying a title race, in terms of taking them into Europe? That’s a bust.

He doesn’t have a clue how to get a tune out of these guys on a bigger stage, and he knows it because we wiped the floor with them all last season. He can talk about fine margins all he wants and about those games being close. The stats, I’m afraid, don’t bear that out, and neither does the record. We played them five times, four of those under him. We won four out of five, and three of those were under him.

He’s deluding himself with the idea that an easy procession against a team that almost got relegated last season means they’re ready to come to Celtic Park in front of only our supporters when we are playing the way we are right now.

And for all we know, we could have three or four new signings in the team of top-class quality. I jest, but none of us really thinks that is going to happen—but we don’t know that and neither does he. And if he thinks they’re even going to be ready for this version of Celtic, let alone the potential version we might see, he’s living in a fantasy land.

But the more I listen to Philippe Clement, the more I think he does live in a fantasy land. The more I think everyone at that club lives in a fantasy land.

As I said yesterday in the piece about Abdallah Sima, only tiny minds could have ever believed that story was anything other than a fantasy.

And yet, I read yesterday that they have two transfer targets for the wide position.

One is Kamara of Norwich, who we’ve also been linked with—which smells like an agent on manoeuvres to me. The other is Morgan Whittaker. Yes, Morgan Whittaker. £10 million Morgan Whittaker. A story so ridiculous that I can hardly even say the words without laughter escaping my lips. And not just a fantasy—that’s certifiably insane.

Did the guy who wrote that report not know it was daft? And when I say daft, I mean something that would stretch credulity more than a romance novel would stretch that of a reader of the classics who accidentally picked it up and started to work his way through it. If a newspaper is only as smart as its readers, I dread to think what the average IQ is of that shrinking segment of the population who still buys the Daily Record every day.

This is shaping up to be a very long week, and I am not looking forward to it in any way, although we’ve got a derby at the end of it in which I fancy our chances as strongly as I have in years; I should be looking forward to that.

But I know that to get there, we’re going to have to wade through rivers of shit, and that dampens my enthusiasm for the days ahead; what’s left of this transfer window, which I have no doubt will be another small slice of Hell, having spent the summer eating piece after piece of it.

But as gloomy as that prospect is for me, I can’t even imagine the stark terror, the permanent sensation of dread, that will be rolling across every fan of the Ibrox club. Every player within that club. Every director who supervises and runs that club.

The focus will be on two places at once: on their own dressing room and how they can move their cheap dreck out in order to bring more cheap dreck in, and on everything that is happening at Celtic. Because in a very real sense, what happens at Celtic will decide how close or not this title race is going to be.

And there’s nothing they can do about that.

We at least are secure in the knowledge that what happens in the next few days, and thus in the rest of this season, is entirely in our own hands.

We have the vast resources to go out and get this right—to go out and make a statement, to go out and bring in quality, and improve this team and this squad. We have the wherewithal to do that. We have the power to make radical changes in the next week.

They are completely at the mercy of events.

Rabbi Matondo had one foot out the door before yesterday afternoon. Do you think Clement’s praise for Matondo and his hope that Matondo stays was based on his performance in that game? Or did those comments suggest to you, as they did to me, that his proposed move has collapsed and they’re stuck with him regardless?

It matters not.

The signs are up. The leaflets are printed, and they’ll be handed around the various clubs of Europe.

It’s fire sale week at Ibrox, and everything must go.