As their board appears to sideline Martin, it’s clear that Ibrox still inhabits “interesting times.”

“May you live in interesting times.”

I wanted to write a different article to start the day. I wanted to write a piece about the Celtic manager, and the big debate about the Celtic manager that we should be having – and we’re not. There was a danger that this article would bleed into that subject in a way I didn’t want, but this article comes first.

And the article I was going to write will make a very fitting follow-up for tomorrow morning.

Before I start, let me repeat something I’ve said in here before, and this is for readers who still don’t get the message – and some of them don’t, even though I’ve been saying this now for a couple of years.

This is not a Celtic site. It’s called The CelticBlog, and it’s about Scottish football as seen through the eyes of Celtic fans.

This is a Scottish football site. It always has been, and as long as I’m editing it, it always will be. I think that it’s a valuable part of the Celtic fan media, because it’s the one site that prides itself on being a Scottish football site.

Celtic exists as part of the Scottish football ecosystem. That is why I will write freely about Aberdeen, about Hearts, about the national team, the SFA, the media and yes – about the club across the city.

I’m glad I got that off my chest. Now I can proceed with the rest.

Last night, the Daily Record did a piece which I’m assuming was supposed to be a canonisation shot on Kevin Thelwell, the new top man at Ibrox – their Sporting Director. This is where this article risks bleeding into the one I want to write tomorrow, just a little. But I’m going to try not to get the two confused.

I read that article and I thought, “Holy Hell. They’re going to have big problems over there.”

The piece strongly suggested that he’s driving the bus – not the manager. And when he talks about hard decisions being made and hard choices, he doesn’t mean hard choices for him. His choices are going to be tough for the manager to deal with.

He’s talking about a major clear-out of the Ibrox dressing room. That should come as no shock to anyone. That’s a necessity. They’ve spent too much money, they’re bleeding red ink, and they need to cut costs.

But ultimately, every manager knows what that means. It means the squad is going to be weaker than he would otherwise want it to be. Now, this has been dressed up in all the usual language about how they intend to have a stronger squad coming out of the window than going in. But at the end of the day, they are trying to cut wherever they can. That is clear. That is obvious. Austerity has arrived.

On this site, we’ve long lamented that we have a chief executive who doesn’t ever speak. He doesn’t have any clear identity. If you stuck a cardboard cut-out in his place in the stand, only those sitting around him would be able to tell the difference. I am sure that he’s a diligent and hard worker behind the scenes. But he is not a CEO in any meaningful sense, because the CEO is traditionally the front-facing person in a company – and yes, even in a football club.

At the very least, he should be out there putting forward some kind of vision for what he wants the club to look like, and how he intends to get us there. He should be articulating some kind of goals. Instead, he is utterly anonymous.

Now, I don’t miss the preening and strutting we used to get from Lawwell. But we also used to get leadership from Lawwell. He would put himself forward for interviews. He would talk to the media. He would occasionally even talk to the fans. I know, because I met him on several occasions. And he’s very personable, very charming. I may disagree with him sometimes, but I like the man as a man.

I’m not sure whether I would like Michael Nicholson or not.

The fact that he chooses not to take a front-line position suggests two things to me. Either he is not suited to talking to people and chooses not to, or he is suited to it and the club would rather not subject us to that.

Likewise Paul Tisdale, and that’s a bit of an oddity.

Paul Tisdale has been brought into the club to do what, exactly? No one seems to know. And since he arrived at the club with whatever remit it is he’s got, he hasn’t said a word to the media. That’s strange, because Tisdale has always been a guy who gets out in front of the media. His whole career, he’s been a guy who put himself out there to be interviewed, to be poked at, to be prodded with questions.

Everywhere but here. And that’s strange, isn’t it?

What it suggests to me is that Tisdale and Nicholson are kept away from the press as a point of policy.

Now either they decided to do this themselves, the board took a decision that they would do it, or someone with enough authority at the club to make that call imposed that discipline on them. And when you consider that – when you consider that this has the look and feel of policy – it suddenly doesn’t seem so strange.

Someone thinks this is the best way to do things.

And as much as I might complain about it, I’ve listened to Thelwell and I’ve listened to Patrick Stewart, and I wonder if those at Celtic who decided on this policy might not be on to something after all.

Because Thelwell’s comments do cast a lot of doubt on how involved the manager is going to be in strategic decision-making about the playing squad and the direction that it moves in. Stewart has also ruffled some feathers with his suggestion that he will act as the instrument of the board and deliver their decisions to the football department.

So, it’s apparent that these two guys are the ones who are really going to be running Russell Martin’s transfer policy. And this is where I think that perhaps our way of doing things may not be quite so bad after all.

The Record is trying to spin this as a collaborative process, but it doesn’t seem like a collaborative process. It won’t seem to other people like it’s a collaborative process. They hear Stewart. They hear Thelwell. Those are the guys making the real decisions on what the shape of the team should look like.

The guy who’s missing from those interviews is Russell Martin, the manager. And whether it’s intentional or not, whether the reading of the room is right or not, these guys have to be aware that it looks like rule by fiat.

Perception is reality, and we must always act in full awareness of that fact. It doesn’t matter what you intend. It is only about how it will be perceived. And it is sometimes not difficult to see what the perception will be from a mile away.

People at the club may not be happy, for example, at the coverage of the January transfer window on some of the Celtic fan sites.

They may believe we’ve been unfair. They may believe that they worked hard and we were the victims of bad luck. They may believe we’ve misrepresented or misunderstood the Kyogo decision, which I said last night on the podcast sent a clear message that this was not a serious club run by serious people.

But here’s the thing – they would have to be extremely stupid people not to recognise that it would be perceived that way.

Perhaps it is some modest recognition of perception that stops Nicholson, that stops Tisdale, from getting in front of the press and talking about their role in the transfers. Perhaps they recognise that the only guy at the club who should be talking about that stuff is the guy in the dugout. The guy the fans want to believe is the one who’s in control of it. And I think most fans do want to believe that it’s the manager who ultimately controls the transfer strategy.

Celtic has for too long operated under the perception – yeah, there’s that word again – that the manager doesn’t have the ultimate say in this. That signings are made without his say-so, without his input, and sometimes without him even wanting the players that he gets, or the players in the positions that he gets them in.

We all know that the Mark Lawwell transfer window was an absolute disaster, and that Rodgers – who had been happy to allow the board that latitude – very swiftly regretted it when he saw what he’d been given.

If you had the CEO, and if you had Tisdale in the press every other day talking about how they were overseeing all the key decision-making and talking about the transfer strategy as if they ultimately held the authority, all of us would be very concerned. And this blog would be writing about it every hour on the hour, demanding to know what the hell these people thought they were doing.

Thelwell sounded an awful lot like a guy who doesn’t care what his manager thinks of that. Who doesn’t care that it rips the floor from underneath his head coach, and I find it equally curious that the commentariat has gone out of its way to make the distinction between a manager and a head coach. The two are very different.

And that’s what I want to talk about in my piece tomorrow – whether this club should have a manager, or a head coach.

My concern has long been that you’ll get a situation like the one they look like they have over there – where the manager is silent on the most important issue involving the construction of his team. Where he is effectively sidelined in that discussion. Where other people at the club appear to be driving the strategy in a direction of their choosing and not his.

And that was the impression I got last night listening to Thelwell talk. That it’s his strategy being followed now, and not necessarily that of Russell Martin.

I can only see that as a recipe for disaster.

Thelwell has been called, by one paper, “the man driving the Ibrox revolution.”

Another has him as leading the cull of the dressing room.

The man who drove the Celtic revolution four years ago was Ange Postecoglou. The man who’s been driving it for the last one and a half years has been Brendan Rodgers, but he had to fight to get those lines of demarcation draw. With the respective positions now established, the trophies have started to flow into the cabinet all over again, and the money with them.

There doesn’t seem to be much confusion over there, either.

Lines of demarcation appear to have been drawn as with at Celtic. But it’s where they’ve been drawn – and who’s on either side of them – that interests me most. The media would rather ignore the obvious implication in these statements. The Ibrox fans will ignore them because they don’t want to see anything that conflicts with their view that this is a brave new dawn, and that all in the garden is going to be rosy.

But actually, it taps into the deepest fears that some of them have about the managerial appointment – that he is nothing but a placeholder, a yes man for those above him. Someone who will act unquestioningly on their decisions, and who has, in very many ways, already subordinated his future and his prospects to their will.

And that was the thing Rodgers realised early; that the people who were imposing their players on him were gambling with his reputation and that it was his job that was ultimately at risk.

Rodgers was not prepared to let other people have his future in their hands.

Martin has taken the opposite view – at least for now. And what’s interesting is that the Thelwell interview comes just days after Martin launched his little broadside about wanting to keep his best players at the club.

The message has already been sent out to him that that’s not his call to make. He has been warned.

But it’s a little too late for him to back out now.

He can fight, and he can argue his case.

But when Clement vowed to do the same last season, Patrick Stewart’s response stood out to me as one of the most consequential things that he said – and I’ve little doubt that he’s still in his job because this is his mindset: “I expect the manager to be pushing me and Nils to be investing in the squad. Equally, we need to push back and ask him to make best use of the players we have got – we can call it healthy tension.”

Whether Russell Martin will see it that way remains to be seen, because tension around a football club, and around decisions like this, is never healthy – especially when the guy in the dugout is the one with his neck on the line.

The Chinese are said to have a curse that says, “may you live in interesting times.” Whether it’s actually theirs or not, it’s clear that it’s not a fluffy statement wishing someone health and happiness; it actually means quite the opposite. It hopes for turmoil, tribulation, crisis, chaos.

At Ibrox, they seem permanently locked into them.

We have another name for that phenomenon of course; we call these The Banter Years.