Celtic left too many tasks too long to be able to fix it all in one summer.

Over and over again, I have given our board a hard time on this blog because it is not made up of football people. Celtic’s board is made up of accountants and lawyers. That is not a proper board of directors for running a professional football club.

That is a board of directors for running some modestly sized company which only has to worry about profit and loss. However, we all know there is a lot more going on here than that.

There was a time, you know, when people on our board understood simple things. I remember Peter Lawwell making the claim that Celtic would go out and buy one blue-chip player every single year, just to maintain the quality of the squad.

There was a time when he knew how important that was. He understood that it was the only way to properly develop and grow. Then something changed. Who knows what it was? But something did.

They call it making hay while the sun shines. Or fixing the roof while the sun shines, if you fancy something a little more DIY.

You do it as a matter of routine, and you do it because it is the perfect time to do it. You do not wait until it rains.

When problems appear, you fix them as they appear. Better still, you stop them appearing in the first place. You do not wait until you have problems everywhere and then try to deal with them all at once. Otherwise, by then it becomes impossible.

When a key player leaves this club, the club should ideally source his replacement before he walks out the building. The club should strike the deal and have it ready to go.

Many of our fans convinced themselves that if we were letting Kyogo go, the club must have lined up a replacement and had him ready. In reality, they hadn’t.

Shockingly, shamefully, ridiculously, there was not. We let our number one striker leave this club without having a clue what came next. Then, instead of fixing that over the summer, we sold another striker, another top striker in Adam Idah. At the same time, we sold a right-sided attacker in Nicolas Kuhn, and we did not replace any of them.

Not only did we let the roof rot, we failed to patch up the brickwork at the side of the house. We also let the lawn grow to such a ridiculous height that you could not even see out the windows. You were peering into the grass.

That is why we’re looking at a summer where the rebuild is massive. This is neglect layered on neglect, complacency piled on complacency, until the whole thing starts to look less like a few repairs and more like a building site.

If you do the job right when the moment demand it there is no panic. There is no mad scramble to recover ground you should never have surrendered. I knew over the course of the last summer that we were heading for the chaos of this one. Too much at Celtic was being left unfixed. We have spent so long being complacent, being arrogant and refusing to fix things that it is no wonder we have ended up in this mess.

What makes it even more maddening is that there was a time when Lawwell himself would never have permitted this. There was a time when he understood that standing still in football is the same as going backwards. He knew that waiting until it rains to fix the roof is not prudence, but negligence.

Yet in the end, he and the board he was chairman of presided over exactly that kind of drift. That is how Celtic arrived here, with holes everywhere, basic work left undone, and the people responsible still acting as though the weather just turned on us out of nowhere.

But it didn’t. The clouds were there for a long time. The leaks were obvious. The warning signs were all over the place.

This mess did not come from one bad transfer window or one unlucky decision. It came from a culture of delay, from a board that stopped thinking like custodians of a football club. They started behaving like caretakers of a balance sheet. That might keep the books looking tidy for a while, but it does not keep the house standing.

We applied sticking plaster solutions when there were gaping holes everywhere. This summer we’ve now got to fix the whole thing. Knowing this board, we’re going to stick even more plasters on the problems. Knowing how they work, we’re still not going to see and do what plainly has to be done. For this reason, someone like O’Neill needs to step up and make sure we start to take a long-term view.