Brian Wilson wants to sell inaction as strength. Celtic deserves better than this.

Yesterday, Celtic chairman Brian Wilson released a video on the club’s official channel in which he defended the board’s decision to remain silent over the past few weeks while allegations, distortions and outright lies swirled around Celtic, our supporters and our players.

Some people are congratulating him for finally speaking.

He deserves no congratulations whatsoever.

Celtic’s silence was not impressive. It was not dignified. It was not professional. It was not part of some clever strategy conceived by serious people who understood that restraint would eventually win the day.

It was pathetic. It was a cowardly approach.

During the period when Celtic should have been defending its position, the club was mute. An entire media ecosystem was allowed to hammer away at us, day after day, publishing nonsense, exaggerating events and building a narrative that bore little resemblance to what had actually happened.

Hearts released statements which helped create and sustain that narrative. Journalists piled on. Pundits speculated wildly. Supporters were smeared. Players were dragged into it. Martin O’Neill’s conduct was questioned, and the events of that day were rewritten by people who either had not watched them properly or had decided that the truth was less useful than the story they wanted to tell.

Where was Celtic? Nowhere.

The club left the fight to fan media, independent bloggers and a 74-year-old manager who had already done more than enough for Celtic this season without also being required to perform the duties of the chairman, the chief executive and the communications department.

The people Celtic has banned, marginalised and treated with contempt were the people who defended the club while its highly paid officials hid in silence.

Think about how disgraceful that is.

Celtic’s board has spent years sneering at independent media. It has refused access, denied recognition and treated supporter-run platforms as irritants. Yet when the club came under sustained attack, it was those same platforms that dismantled the lies, challenged the timelines, exposed the contradictions and defended Celtic’s name.

The blogs did the work.

Martin O’Neill did the work.

The people whose actual job it was to defend the institution did nothing.

Brian Wilson has now stuck his head above the parapet after the enemy has fired every round, exhausted its ammunition and been beaten back by people braver than him. That is not leadership. It is not a triumph. It is the political equivalent of arriving at the battlefield after the fighting is over, stepping carefully around the bodies and claiming credit for the victory.

Nobody should be indulging it.

Wilson appears to believe that Celtic’s silence can now be presented as evidence of professionalism. Nobody seriously believes that. The silence was not measured. It was gutless.

There is a difference between refusing to react to every piece of nonsense and refusing to react to anything at all. There is a difference between keeping your powder dry and having no intention of entering the fight. There is a difference between restraint and paralysis.

Celtic did not choose its moment. It missed every moment.

The club had numerous opportunities to challenge what was being said. It could have corrected false claims. It could have defended its supporters. It could have challenged the disgraceful suggestion that the club had acted improperly. It could have supported its manager publicly and forcefully when his own comments drew the predictable flak.

Instead, it left O’Neill to stand alone.

Wilson now sounds ridiculous trying to portray that silence as some kind of deliberate act of corporate discipline. It is an insult to the intelligence of every supporter who watched the story unfold.

We know what professionalism looks like. It looks like having accurate information ready. It looks like responding calmly but firmly. It looks like naming falsehoods and correcting them. It looks like protecting the reputation of the club and the people who represent it.

Professionalism does not mean hiding under the desk until the danger has passed. Professionalism does not mean allowing others to define the story while you stare at the walls. Professionalism does not mean emerging several weeks later to tell everyone that your disappearance was part of the plan.

No serious person believes that.

What makes Wilson’s intervention even weaker is that he still refuses to name names.

Everyone knows who pushed this narrative. Everyone knows which journalists published false or misleading claims about Celtic supporters and the events of that day. Everyone knows the role Hearts played in creating doubt and fuelling the controversy. Everyone knows who decided to behave as if Celtic had committed some great offence when the evidence did not support it.

So say it. Name them. Pin them to the wall.

Criticise Hearts directly, as Martin O’Neill has done. Identify the journalists who got the story wrong. Challenge those who smeared Celtic supporters. Point to the claims that were false and explain precisely why they were false … and take action against those who pushed those claims, and the outlets they work for.

What is the purpose of speaking if you are still terrified of saying anything?

Wilson’s video is full of the usual vague language used by people who want the credit for taking a stand without accepting any of the risks involved in actually taking one. He wants to criticise the narrative without identifying the people who created it. He wants to defend Celtic without confronting those who attacked it. He wants to appear forceful while remaining safely within the boundaries of what the board considers polite.

That is not a defence. It is a cowardly piece of theatre.

Those of us in fan media named names because names mattered. We challenged the specific journalists who made specific claims. We criticised Hearts because Hearts deserved criticism. We laid out the sequence of events and compared it with what was being reported.

Martin O’Neill did the same.

He did not mumble about unnamed forces and vague concerns. He challenged the narrative in public. He first did it on TalkSport, sitting in front of Jim White and others who were perfectly capable of asking questions and pushing back. He then reinforced his position at the official press conference before the cup final.

That is what courage looks like.

O’Neill entered environments he did not control. He made his case in front of journalists. He accepted that questions would follow. He trusted his command of the facts and his ability to answer the questions put to him.

Brian Wilson sat in front of Celtic’s in-house media team.

Releasing this statement through the official club channel was itself an act of weakness. Wilson was allowed to speak in a sanitised, controlled environment where there was no prospect of interruption, challenge or follow-up.

Nobody could ask him why Celtic had remained silent for so long. Nobody could ask him why the club had failed to defend O’Neill. Nobody could ask him why Hearts had not been criticised directly. Nobody could ask him which media reports he believed were false. Nobody could ask him whether Celtic’s communications strategy had failed. Nobody could ask him why fan media had been forced to do the job of the club’s own officials.

The whole thing had the atmosphere of a third-rate tinpot dictatorship producing a carefully staged broadcast to reassure the population that the leadership had everything under control.

It did not have everything under control. Other people got the situation under control. Wilson merely turned up afterwards.

The official club channel has its uses, but it should not be used as a bunker where senior figures retreat whenever they want to issue grand statements without facing questions. If the chairman has something important to say about the integrity of the game, the conduct of another club or the treatment of Celtic in the press, then he should sit in front of the media and say it.

He should allow journalists to question him. He should be prepared to defend his position. He should show the same nerve that Martin O’Neill showed.

Instead, Celtic’s chairman chose the safest possible setting after others had already fought the battle. The timing was cowardly, the format was cowardly and the refusal to name those responsible was cowardly.

That may sound harsh, but what else are supporters supposed to call it?

This club has become far too comfortable with silence. Its officials say nothing when supporters deserve answers. They say nothing when the club’s reputation is under attack. They say nothing when narratives are constructed around us. They say nothing until the moment has passed and the risk has disappeared.

Then, when they finally emerge, they expect applause simply for demonstrating that they are still alive. The standard cannot be that low.

Celtic is one of the biggest football clubs in Britain. It has millions of supporters across the world, substantial financial resources and a communications operation that should be capable of defending the institution when necessary.

Yet when the pressure arrived, the board behaved like frightened amateurs.

The manager had to defend the club. The supporters had to defend the club.

The chairman hid and Wilson does not get to rewrite that history now. He does not get to tell us that silence was strength. He does not get to pretend that refusing to act was an act of professionalism. He does not get to take a victory lap after other people won the race. The club’s silence did not protect Celtic. It abandoned Celtic.

That is the truth of it.

Martin O’Neill understood that some lies become accepted if they are not challenged. Fan media understood it too. The only people who appeared not to understand were those sitting inside Celtic Park with the titles, the salaries and the formal responsibility to act. They should be ashamed of that.

Brian Wilson’s video does not erase the failure. It confirms it.

The chairman had the opportunity to demonstrate leadership when leadership was required. He chose silence. He had the opportunity to confront the people who smeared the club. He chose vagueness. He had the opportunity to face questions in public. He chose the safety of the club’s own cameras.

That is not courage after the event. There is no such thing. Had he stood with the fans and the manager in countering the lies at the time he would deserve all the credit in the world.

Instead, he turns up after the battle is over, bayonets a couple of enemy corpses and thinks he can take a victory lap.

I do not think so.

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