All eyes amongst the Celtic support are now on Michael Nicholson. About time too.

Yesterday, I was very pleased to see an article on The Celtic Star about this summer being a critical one for Michael Nicholson. I agree, wholeheartedly, not only with the sentiment but with everything in that article.

When it comes to Nicholson, a lot of people have been very late to the party. But I’ve been against his appointment from day one. I thought it reeked. I thought it was low ambition, low calibre. I never thought he was the right guy, and nothing I’ve seen since his hiring has done anything to change my mind.

Where Nicholson has gotten lucky to an extent because there have been more obvious targets over the last couple of years. Most notably, Mark Lawwell, who was the lightning rod for much of the anger that fans felt during Brendan Rodgers’ first transfer window.

Nicholson was hired as an interim appointment after the bizarre departure of Dom McKay, which to this day has never been properly explained to the fans—as if we’re children who wouldn’t be able to grasp the complexities.

That departure was, I think, a dark day for this club. McKay was a thoroughly professional individual who wanted to take the club in a different direction. What this board opted for instead was continuity, and that was exemplified in their continuity candidate to replace him. I always thought it was the club’s way of saying, “Nothing’s going to change after all.”

This site, and a couple of others, have tried to push Nicholson into the front line over the last 12 or so months. While I still believe that he represents only a part of the overall problem at Celtic—with the chairman representing a much bigger concern—Nicholson is now the rod that takes the lightning.

It’s good to see him not only getting scrutiny but proper criticism. It’s good to see that the spotlight is finally shining on the guy who should be right at the centre of it.

I don’t care whether Nicholson just likes to keep a low profile, or whether he’s dancing on the strings held above his head—or indeed whether he’s a talking glove puppet with the chairman’s hand up his backside. Nicholson is not an impressive character.

He doesn’t come across as someone offering leadership. He has about as much charisma as a wet drunk still standing in the rain.

He doesn’t seem like someone who commands respect in the football department, and I would imagine there have been one or two occasions when he and Rodgers have fundamentally disagreed on something.

We can infer that from the fact that, as far as Rodgers is concerned, Nicholson is practically absent from the big conversations.

Whenever the manager talks about contracts—his own or for players—you get the impression he prefers to handle those things directly with Desmond and skip the nonsense of dealing with Nicholson and others at the club. It doesn’t even matter whether that’s true or false. There’s enough circumstantial evidence to suggest it, but what really matters here is perception.

As we often say on this site, perception is reality. It has a way of forming into something so apparently solid and well-structured that people just accept it as real. The perception of Nicholson is that he’s an empty shirt, a guy who’d be better off staying at home playing Football Manager than actually acting on behalf of our club.

That spotlight he’s under now isn’t something he’ll enjoy very much—because not only will he get blamed for things that aren’t his fault, but there will be nowhere to hide when it comes to the things that are.

His supporters will scream blue murder that it’s not fair. Who cares if it’s fair? This is real life we’re living in. Life isn’t fair.

I often think of a West Wing moment, where Sam Seaborn, one of the speechwriters, gets drafted into the Oval Office to cover for Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff. Sam doesn’t know the rules of the room, and there’s a moment when one of the visitors starts hammering the president over a policy decision.

Sam steps in and says, “Actually, that was my idea,” and the president immediately intervenes to shut him down and takes the flak.

Later, Sam is confused and calls Josh to ask why the president did that, and Josh tells him that in the Oval Office, nothing is ever not the president’s fault. He’s the decision-maker. He’s the one who makes the call.

That, to me, is the perfect way to understand what the modern CEO is about. That’s how they should be judged—as the ultimate decision-maker, the one who cops the flak when things go wrong.

Lawwell hated that part of the job. He still hates being criticised. He’s not above picking up the phone and trying to “set the record straight” when he’s on the receiving end. But at least Lawwell understood that the criticism came with the territory. It’s part of the gig. If you can’t handle that, maybe you shouldn’t be doing the job.

The time when Nicholson could avoid scrutiny is over. The spotlight is on him now, and it should have been on him for a long time. He’s not going to be able to escape it. Because the perception of this guy is so poor, he’ll get blamed even for things that aren’t in his purview. That’s just the reality of it, as inconvenient as that might be for him.

Nicholson should have got in front of a camera shortly after being announced in the job. There was no reason not to. Every CEO at one of the Glasgow clubs has fronted up to the media soon after taking over. Some of them have courted publicity at every step. While I’m happy for Rodgers to be the front face of the club in many respects, it is unconscionable that Nicholson has never gotten in front of the fans, not even once, to present a coherent vision. It’s a gross insult to all of us.

This is it now. He’s in the public eye. He’s the front-line guy. If there are issues with signings, if there are issues with the manager’s contract, if there are issues with players leaving, the finger will be pointed at him for all of it.

So, his performance in this window needs to be perfect, or he’s going to come under real and sustained scrutiny of a very negative sort.

In many ways, that’s already begun.

The Green Brigade recently pointed the finger at him in a very public way, when two of their members went on The Cynic podcast and gave him a pasting. They claimed he lied to the fans. Fans shouldn’t tolerate that.

But there’s been no follow-up. No real backlash. He’s gotten away with it. He appears to have lied to supporters and gotten away with it. For now. But people are not going to forget. Nor should they. He needs to get everything right.