Ibrox thinks “staunch” will save them. Celtic have nothing to fear from that.

So, as I said earlier, I decided I was going to write about the Ibrox club and their proposed signing policy today. The Shankland deal is the start of it.

They are not going to spend a large sum of money this summer. Not until they can move some players on. That is why they are going, at the moment, for cheap signings or players they can get for free. The pattern they are following is very familiar.

They are going for guys they think are tough. Guys they believe can add some steel to their ranks.

It is only a week or so since their chairman made his statement about how they are going to prioritise Scottish players and players from this league. As you all know, I have balked at the idea that Celtic should even be thinking about pursuing such a mad, dangerous, reckless and witless path as trying to sign an SPFL select. It is nuts.

There is a reason these guys are playing in Scotland. They are not going to take us to the next level.

But the Ibrox fixation with signing players from Scotland is not just about Scotland. It is not just about going for local, cheap players. It is about reconfiguring their squad and firming it up with that which so many of their fans are convinced they need most: staunchness.

They believe that if they sign enough die-hard, “real Ranjurs men” they will power themselves to a title. It is a farcical suggestion.

They have pointed to the need for players who “get the club”, who understand the club. But the club they are talking about has three trophies in 14 years. What exactly is there to get?

They think that connection with the support and with the club’s history is crucial to putting together a title-winning team. I have never heard such a nonsensical idea in my life.

They point to what Gerrard did as proof. But Gerrard needed Covid to save his bacon and, unless there is going to be another global pandemic, they are not going to get that lucky again. That Ibrox team was there for the taking.

What does it mean to understand a football club and its culture? Does it really matter?

If your football club has a sufficiently robust culture, any player who signs for it will be aware of the club, aware of what that culture is and will know whether or not they are broadly aligned with it.

If you sign for Barcelona, you do not need to be surrounded by former Barcelona players telling you what that means. You already know what that means. Presumably, it was one of the things that made you sign in the first place.

Can you even imagine having some tattooed goon on the Ibrox staff lean into your face and try to explain their Kulture to you? Good God.

The talk is that they want a Scottish identity, a Scottish core. But they have had that before and it has not worked.

This is exactly what I was talking about the other night when I was discussing shortcuts. They think this is a shortcut. They think staunch is a shortcut. They think having players steeped in the faith of the club is a shortcut.

But how many players out there in the Scottish Premiership are both good enough to play at that level and not yet playing at it? How many could their club actually get for modest sums of money?

Dig down a little bit into their forums and onto their websites.

Look a little bit at the kind of people they are talking about and you will find something very interesting. You will find a lot of talk which has nothing to do with talent; it’s about wanting people who hate Celtic as much as their supporters do.

That is what they mean when they say they want a Scottish core.

They want players who are motivated to beat us.

That would be fine if they played us every week. But they don’t. They are looking at this completely the wrong way, but that is typical of Ibrox.

Needless to say, those on their board of directors probably love this. They probably have no problem with this proposed policy at all. After all, if you can get players directly from the SPFL, they are going to be cheaper than if you were buying them from elsewhere in Europe.

Even with the standard Glasgow tax applied, they are not going to pay over the odds for these guys. That makes it attractive to their club and its corporate owners.

I will be blunt with you. When I heard them talking about this last week, my first thought was: we’ll never get that lucky.

Then today, there they are trying to sign Shankland. They are trying to sign Dan Neil from Sunderland. Two guys available for relatively little, one of them past his peak years, both fitting the purpose of adding experience and steel to their squad. They believe that is crucial.

But I look at a Celtic side that has very little obvious steel in it, and it still got over the line in the Premiership title race.

We have all lamented, in fact, that this team of ours, especially the midfield, can be bullied off the ball at times. If you get in their faces, some of these guys will wilt.

So, again, forgive me for saying it, but it seems like a misdiagnosis to me.

It wasn’t steel that won us the title. There was determination there, for sure. There was will there, absolutely. There was also an iron mentality. But that comes from being serial winners. It comes from self-belief and from being surrounded by good players.

They just do not get this.

Is hatred really enough of a driving force? If a team filled with staunch was all it was going to take, they could pull eleven guys out of the stand, shove them into football tops and make that the core of their squad.

But you need a baseline of talent. You need a certain level of skill. You need to have won things and to know what that feels like. You need to know you are strong enough to keep winning things.

There are people at every level of that club who are obsessed with this stuff. Obsessed with the idea that only if they can fill the team with enough people who hate us, and who think the rest of Scottish football is only worthy of their contempt, can they climb back to the top.

But I wrote the piece The Secret Of Our Success yesterday, in which I said that contempt is the very reason why they underestimate teams over and over again.

The minute you put someone in a blue Ibrox jersey and tell them they are special, you cease to have respect for the opposition. That is dangerous even if you have better players. It is dangerous even if you have a better manager.

We are not even two days after the season ended and already you have foolish individuals in the media, such as Tom English, suggesting that Shankland signing for the Ibrox club would take some beating as the signing of the summer.

What does that even mean?

Everyone knows the Ibrox club wins the pre-season cup every year. Everyone knows that, in January, they were widely regarded as having had an almost perfect window. They finished third. So to say that when the season has been finished for barely 24 hours is moronic, if we are being generous.

But this is part of that belief system. They want players who understand how this works. Players who understand what the Ibrox club represents. Players who “get Scottish football”, as though that were the be-all and end-all.

But who has been on top of Scottish football for all these years?

What does “getting Scottish football” mean if you are not playing at Celtic Park? Does it mean understanding how to sit in a system which thinks second or third is a win?

The truly good players in this league stand out a country mile.

Not the one-season flashes in the pan, but the John McGinn’s and the Stuart Armstrong’s. The guys you know, because you have watched them over an extended period, season after season, are big-bank players of the future.

Ibrox’s brand-new transfer strategy is predicated on absolute nonsense.

It is doomed to failure.

Even if they somehow find eleven Scottish boys who dreamed of wearing the jersey and are willing to run through walls, does that necessarily mean those players are going to have what it takes to wrestle the title out of Celtic’s hands?

Not a chance.

In fact, it will do the opposite. It will hammer that club even further into the hole it has dug for itself. It will imprison that club all the more inside the wall it has built around itself.

Nobody at Celtic will be crying themselves to sleep over its short-sighted, bigoted nature. It is another step on the road to ruin.

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