No, Celtic didn’t lose the COVID title because of Johnny Foreigner.

Charlie Mulgrew’s latest remarks, in defence of Neil Lennon’s second spell at the club, leave a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve got to be honest with you. I read his comments today on why Celtic didn’t win 10 in a row and, forgive me for saying it, but for a minute I thought I’d stumbled into a Reform Party meeting.

So let me see if I’ve got this straight. Lennon was a great manager, and what really brought us down was the fact that we weren’t able to sell key members of the squad that year. Because those key players were foreigners and couldn’t be trusted to do what the manager wanted or uphold the standards of the club.

Have I got that right? Aye, that seems to be the gist of it.

The fault was nothing to do with Lennon. It was Johnny Foreigner, and the solution, which COVID supposedly denied us, was to send them all back home. I mean, that really is what he’s saying. I don’t care that he may not have intended to come off sounding like Nigel Farage. That is how he sounds, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

This whole shtick about a dressing room full of British players somehow being better equipped to get it done is just nonsense.

The top clubs on this island are stacked with foreign players. You could count the number of British players on one hand at most of them. Ange Postecoglou’s double-winning Celtic side, one of the best we’ve seen in years, was a veritable United Nations. Of all the excuses offered up for the failure of that season, this is one of the most rancid.

Lennon had problems with the dressing room. That much is true.

But he’s the one who blew it up.

He’s the one who crashed us out of a major European competition through his own tactical ineptitude and then blamed the dressing room. He’s the one who threw his own players under the bus.

He’s the one who suggested half the squad didn’t want to be at Celtic in the first place.

That is to say nothing of the fact that not a single one of his big-money signings was a real success. So, I’ve always found this endless casting around for other people to blame more than a little disingenuous.

Neil Lennon is a very good commentator, and I like listening to him when he isn’t defending our board of directors or sniping at his own critics. He is a sub-standard football boss, which is why he’s at a second-tier Scottish side and not managing a Premier League giant.

He made mistakes. He ought to get over the fact that people point that out from time to time. His friends would do well not to push this kind of rubbish on his behalf.

Mulgrew in particular, I am pretty much sick of the sight and sound of at this point, because if ever someone looked like he was trying to ingratiate himself with the Celtic hierarchy, it is this guy. The latest to join that little queue is Aiden McGeady, whose suggestion that he could come in and help the youth players looks very much like a naked appeal to the board of directors to carve out a place for him.

It’s an observable phenomenon. Towards the end of a regime, in the latter stages of a crumbling empire, you always find the flatterers and the hangers-on fluttering around the royal court in greater numbers than before.

The reason is simple enough. They understand that things have reached a critical stage where merit is no longer the main serious consideration when it comes to who gets a seat at the table and who does not.

Look at the Celtic board right now and you do not see ambition. You do not see intent. You see people who have just handed James Forrest a one-year contract extension and you think, yes, this is exactly why they all believe there is a chance to get on board the gravy train. Because the whole club is being run on short-term thinking, patching up holes instead of correcting structural faults.

Maybe these people think there is even an outside chance that it will be Lennon himself who gets the manager’s job, on the basis that he got to the Scottish Cup final and knocked a couple of Premier League teams out on the way.

Just when you think something is too stupid to happen, this club has a habit of amazing you. It has a habit of stunning you. It has a habit of giving you the one outcome you thought you would never see.

Mulgrew’s comments today are really awful.

If this is how he thinks, then I don’t want him anywhere near Celtic Park in any capacity. Not that I would have been thrilled to see him there anyway, but this is so backward and wrong-headed that it sounds like something I’ve been hearing out of Ibrox for years.

Not only is it disproved by history, given that some of the best players ever to wear the Hoops were not British lads, it also just sounds grubby. It’s the kind of argument that leaves you wanting a shower afterwards.

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