Jackson’s piece on Celtic’s transfer window is sheer fantasy. His ideas for Ibrox are worse.

Jackson can always be relied upon. His work is almost always awful, and today was no exception. I sometimes read this guy and lament his lack of genuine talent as a scribe. Most of the time I just wonder how someone could be as stupid as he appears to be. Today is a perfect example of why, in so many ways that I was compelled to do this.

Let’s get down to it. The subject matter is us and what our transfer window means for the club across town. But it is all constructed on a giant “if”, and I frankly have my doubts about it. But he jumps right in, and so shall we starting with the title.

Dream Celtic transfer window means only Ibrox regime change will halt an unbridgeable chasm – Keith Jackson

First, and most obvious, the “dream” transfer window remains only a possibility. We’ll get to that in more detail later. But quite how Ibrox “regime change” would make a difference is a mystery to me. How it would “bridge” the chasm between the two clubs, even if it did come, is an even bigger one. Here’s the sub-heading.

Jota and Kieran Tierney plus a top striker spells wonderful news for Hoops fans but scary stuff for Gers supporters

Only the Jota deal is done yet. And the striker deal, whatever that is, is virtually guaranteed to be a let down. Jackson now begins, and this is so bad that it makes my veins tighten up.

With one week still to go before the end of the January sales, it’s beginning to feel as if Celtic are showboating around their own boardroom already.

Good God. And as bad as that is, it’s about to get worse.

Put it this way, it doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to envisage chairman Peter Lawwell doing keepy-uppies at one end of the big oak table and CEO Michael Nicholson lollipopping stepovers and nutmegging a chair at the other.

My own imagination, as good as it is, could certainly not have conjured that image up, but I think it says more about his than it does about mine. I marvel at the stuff that goes on in this guy’s head, but when he briefly convinced himself that there was still a title race it proved that he sees the world through a lens that could make him a millionaire as a novelist if only he was capable of stringing coherent sentences together. I’ve covered this subject already; these guys do not deserve the honey being poured on them. They sold saleable assets for the market value and we’re getting two of them back only because their moves have ended in failure. The bigger failure, to me, is that we’re going back to former players instead of seeking new heroes … that suggests that we have some problems in the scouting system.

Because right now the pair of them are smashing the window to pieces while enabling manager Brendan Rodgers to take his team to an entirely new level. And, let’s face it, Scotland’s champions were already some considerable distance ahead of all the rest before Lawwell and Nicholson started pulling all manner of rabbits out of their respective hats.

What rabbits have they pulled out of hats? Explain it to me. At the time of writing some of this is theoretical. Rodgers team has not been taken to “an entirely new level” at all. With the sale of Kyogo we’ve gone backwards as regards our striking options. Even if we get Tierney, we’re losing a young Spanish youth prospect to do it and we’ve got Jota but that’s only us signing the type of player the manager wanted when the window opened. If we don’t sign a striker, and a good one, we’re materially weaker in that area no matter how some people want to dress it up. These guys might get the job done, but we’ve got a week to go and plenty of reasons for our doubts.

It’s worth stating here the sleight of hand involved in pulling this all together has been nothing short of remarkable. Having been bounced against their will into sanctioning the sale of talisman Kyogo Furuhashi, Celtic’s hierarchy have responded in rapid and emphatic fashion.

Absolute rubbish from start to finish. Tierney is being released by his club at the end of the season. Jota was on the transfer list. And the part about being “bounced against our will” in terms of Kyogo is, I’m afraid, reeking bullshit. The club had him under contract. We could very easily have said no and even more easily kept him for one more week. It’s dereliction of duty to send this team to Birmingham weaker than it needs to be … nothing will change that. These people and their decision making have made that game harder than it needed to be, and we might pay for that.

In Kieran Tierney and Jota, they are about to seal the return of two much loved prodigal sons previously sold for a combined sum of £50million. Tierney will arrive as a free transfer from Arsenal while Celtic will welcome Jota back from Rennes with open arms while still being a couple of million quid up on the deal which takes a 30-year-old Kyogo to a relegation fight in France.

I repeat; all we’re losing is our top striker, who will need to be replaced.

And – aged 27 and 25 and in spite of Tierney’s wretched history of injuries – it seems reasonable to assume both of these players may still have their best years still ahead of them. And plenty of them. It all adds up to a quite sensational bit of ducking and diving and it seems very likely that at least one further addition will be made in the coming days with Rodgers eyeing a new striker to bolster his attacking options for the remainder of the campaign.

I hope that Rodgers gets what he wants. In the case of those two players he is getting guys he has clearly prioritised. But I ask you to consider the following question; are these really the signings the board would have wanted him to make? Aged 27 and 25, they may have good years ahead of them but the re-sale value isn’t as clear. I strongly suspect our board would have preferred a couple of project signings in those positions, guys in their early 20’s. Jackson and others are praising the board for deals that I suspect they are sanctioning through gritted teeth. It’s absurd.

To that end, Danish youngster Mathias Kvistgaarden remains a person of significant interest even though Brondby will demand a fee in excess of £13m before allowing the 22-year-old to move on. Other names such as Brighton’s Evan Ferguson and AC Milan striker Tammy Abraham continue to the rounds so it’s little wonder Celtic’s supporters are quickly adjusting to the prospect of life without their little Japanese magician.

If it’s the first of those players then fine, and cost be damned because that’s the price you pay when you sell your top striker before you sign his replacement and everyone then realises you’re desperate. The signings of a Brighton youth player or some ex wonderkid on loan scream of being reactive signings and hold no appeal for me whatsoever because we’ve had months to prepare for this sale and if that’s the best we can do then I’m entirely unimpressed. Why should we be impressed by a kid or a guy who has flopped at his current club, signed on a short term basis? I’m entirely unmoved by famous names or the appearance of bling.

Short of a sentimental Virgil van Dijk deciding to end his time in British football where it all began or Henrik Larsson suddenly announcing that he’s coming out of retirement, it’s difficult to imagine how Celtic could make the remaining days of this transfer window any more enjoyable for their rank and file than they are right now.

Written by someone with not the slightest knowledge of what Celtic fans are thinking. Most of us are extremely concerned by what’s going on and especially as there is no sign on the horizon of a deal for the kind of striker who would offer us the hope that we’ve not been let down here in a big, big way. I very much doubt that I’m going to enjoy any of the next week in terms of our transfer business. On the contrary, I won’t be surprised if Jota and some uninspiring loanee is all we get … we’ll be promised “jam tomorrow” of course but that’s an old trick from Lawwell and Co.

The prospect of Tierney and Jota running riot down the left flank while Alistair Johnston and Nicolas Kuhn wreak all sorts of havoc, tag teaming on the opposite flank ought to strike terror into the rest of the teams in Scotland’s top flight – and to one club in particular.

If that scenario ever comes about I’ll be very surprised indeed. I’d like to think it will, but I know too much about how this club does things.

How exactly do (the Ibrox club) even attempt to keep pace with Rodgers and his side now that Celtic have turned on the transfer market after burners? Yes, they cut the gap at the top of the table yesterday back to 10 points with a victory at Tannadice but that vast margin only narrowed a little because their rivals from across the city were given the weekend off courtesy of Storm Eowyn.

Once again, where is this transfer business he speaks of? We’ve not done some of this yet! At best, we might have signed Jota but we’ll be sacrificing our top striker to do it. Jota is a great signing; I’m delighted with it, but the team, as a result, will be no stronger than it is right now and in some ways it will arguably be weaker. Jota is weeks from match sharpness. Right now we’d have to move Maeda inside so as not to make our forward line weaker, and if the choice on the left is an unfit Jota or a fully functioning Maeda that’s no choice at all and anything else leaves us substantially worse off than we were. This whole article is based on stuff that might happen but has not happened yet.

So Rodgers and his men still have a midweek home game against Dundee up their sleeve as they close in on what will be a fourth consecutive league title. In other words, Celtic were already miles ahead of their neighbours even before Lawwell and Nicholson intervened in the market to further strengthen their manager’s hand.

On and on and on he goes telling the same basic untruth; right now, at the time of writing, we know we’re losing Kyogo and that Jota is coming in. It’s a straight one for one swap which solves our problem of strengthening our wide options but leaves us with a brand new one, entirely of their making. I am so tired of people dealing in fantasy instead of dealing with reality. This is a classic case of it.

And it seems more and more obvious now that only some sort of fundamental regime change will be required if Ibrox are to have even a remote chance of shifting the dial back in their own favour where this old rivalry is concerned.

Right there is the problem with the club across the city, in a nutshell. If this board can’t find a way to match Celtic then just move them out and bring in one which can. That this is a complex, messy and ultimately useless idea doesn’t seem to bother this moron. Three questions automatically arise; 1) who? 2) how? 3) then what? But a guy who can imagine Michael Nicholson nutmegging a chair in the boardroom probably doesn’t have any difficulty generating answers to those questions, even if they do involve beanstalk beans, magic money trees or fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Having spent a month or so getting his feet under the table, new CEO Patrick Stewart must now realise the almighty extent of the job he has taken on. Stewart may even have reached the conclusion he’s shoehorned himself into the ultimate hiding to nothing unless he can foster a mood around the boardroom for meaningful and radical change.

Yeah cause every new CEO ever appointed makes it an immediate priority to walk into the offices of the people who hired him to say “Right, it’s time to pack up and piss off. We need some new thinking in this building.”

The current lot which Stewart heads up is a largely dysfunctional collection of investors with decent sized pockets and even bigger egos. These men may mean well and they certainly talk a great deal about having the club’s best interests at heart but the majority of them have presided over a decade of dismal under achievement.

Compared to what? They’ve consistently finished second in a league dominated by a super-club. They have even won a title in one campaign. Those useless individuals have also seen their team get to a European final; we never hear the end of it when they are in the mood to capitalise on it, but when it comes to these situations they erase it from the record completely. They’ve also funded the club out of their own pockets. You find other “investors” who will have such a loose definition of that word.

They are part of the problem even if they can’t quite bring themselves to admit it. So, while Philippe Clement is scratching around in the bargain basement, attempting to source some odds and ends, Celtic are flexing their huge financial muscle and ensuring that the Belgian is effectively trying to shove water up a hill.

In the event we sign Jota and Tierney, the Kyogo deal out of the club makes that a revenue neutral window. In no universe which works on the basis of this one is that this club flexes financial muscle. Whatever you think of those two deals, we’re looking at a net profit rather than a net spend. And Ibrox is shopping where a club in their state can afford to. It’s overspending which got them here. I’m not sure why Jackson and others think the answer to that is … more of the same.

It’s getting close to becoming an impossible task which is maybe why Stewart chose not to pull the trigger on Clement after taking over his position last month. Perhaps he has concluded the club is in such a state of deep decline that simply changing the man at the wheel won’t make any discernible difference to the general direction of travel.

And he would be entirely correct to think so.

For his part, Clement can only continue to plod along while hoping for an upturn in performances and in particular a rapid turnaround in his team’s form away from home. Yesterday’s win at Dundee United has at least stopped some of the bleeding for the time being and Clement can take consolation too from the nature of the near miss against Manchester United just when it seemed Cyriel Dessers had earned them another Europa League point.

But the knives are sharpened just in case.

That cameo at Old Trafford was enough for Dessers to earn a start in Tayside, where he lashed home another spectacular finish to wrap up a 3-1 win. But, while Clement must now cling to the hope this Nigerian enigma could still come good on a consistent basis, Celtic will dive back into the market this week to tool themselves up with a new striker of their own and, most probably, at considerable expense. And that perfectly sums up the state of play where both of these clubs are concerned.

Like everything else in the article that entire paragraph is loaded down with some very big assumptions and I wouldn’t count on any of them counting off.

The gulf opening up between them is starting to look like the kind of chasm which might never be bridged.

It already is, and the only possible way that the Ibrox club can catch us is, perversely, if we start going backwards. Selling your top striker and not signing a replacement at a time when your club is rolling in cash would be one Hell of a good start if those at the top of your house had set a policy of doing just that.

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