Real damage has been done to Celtic no matter who is at Lennoxtown.

And so, the day passed yesterday without the expected clarification on Celtic’s coaching team. (It came today.) I am sure there will be people at our club who doubtless think that no comment yesterday was comment enough, that once training starts at Lennoxtown today whoever is there will simply be accepted and the issue quietly closed. They will assume the fans will just get behind it because, in the end, what other choice do we have?

But silence does not project strength.

It projects weakness.

It does not suggest confidence.

It suggests contempt, and you know what?

I think it is supposed to.

If the players had turned up today and there was no Maloney and no Fotheringham, then the club would have been a joke. The people who run it are a disgrace. The conduct of the board of directors is a shameful embarrassment and a stain on our reputation.

But equally, if the players turned up for training today and Maloney and Fotheringham were there unannounced, then what would that have told you? What does that tell you about the contempt the club has for all of us, and for the manager too?

I know exactly what these people think of all of us.

If they do a deal, if there is no fanfare and no explanation, they hope they get to pretend there never was an issue. They hope they can act as though there never were any problems, as though the whole coaching crisis did not exist.

They will continue to treat us as though we are the joke. But it is pretty obvious how the rest of the football world will actually see it.

One of the things we all have to consider when we analyse the current state of this club is just how incredible it is that we have got here at all. Because only 12 months ago we were coming off a successful season.

Rodgers was still the manager. There were some questions about his future, yes, but the general impression among the media and among most Celtic supporters was that the club and the people running it were doing all right.

We had broken our transfer record in the previous summer window, and the assumption among most people was that we were ready to go again and perhaps even break it a second time. Some of us warned against people getting carried away.

Then the chaos began.

The steady undermining of Rodgers. The project signings brought in to replace key members of the team. The sale of Idah when we still had not replaced Kyogo. The sale of Nicolas Kühn and no serious attempt to sign a proper replacement.

We had Go Ahead Eagles asking one price for Breum and Celtic effectively offering to pay them half of it, a move so cynical and so arrogant that you could almost believe it was intended as an insult.

Two other deals collapsed on the brink of being done, one of them after the player in question had thanked his club and effectively signalled his departure.

Supporters’ quiet concern turned into disgust as it became obvious that Rodgers was not only not getting the players he wanted, but that the club was actively seeking to undermine him and then find ways to blame him for the mess it had created.

With no serious attempt made to rebalance the side, with numerous goals taken out of the first-team squad, we went into the Champions League tie with Kairat totally undercooked. A handful of us said very clearly at the time that the tie was dangerous, that there were no guarantees at all we would come through it without serious reinforcements. There were no reinforcements. Disaster followed.

By the end of that summer, much of the media was baffled by the astonishing collapse in professional standards at Celtic.

Within a matter of months, we were miles behind in the title race and had lost the manager at a time when he was clearly unhappy, clearly unsettled and furious over a transfer window that had been a disgrace and attacks which some had launched at him through the media.

There was never any question that Rodgers was going to allow himself to be undermined any further. Him walking out the door surprised absolutely nobody who had been paying attention. Then came the astonishing next act.

Appointing O’Neill, watching him drag us back into a title race we looked out of, putting us in a cup final, making us a credible proposition in Europe, and then replacing him on the eve of Hearts coming to Celtic Park, with a cup final, a major series of European away games and an Ibrox visit all arriving in a matter of weeks, was one of the most cack-handed, chaotic and self-destructive things many of us have ever seen from Celtic.

Then they had to fire the replacement after just eight games.

That was astonishing too.

To bring back O’Neill, send him into battle and then fail to support him in the January transfer window in any meaningful way sealed the view of these people as disastrous custodians of Celtic.

We now have a full on fan revolt and serious concerns about our standing. These events have obliterated a hard-won and carefully built reputation the club once had for professionalism and pragmatism.

Celtic now looks rudderless, directionless and leaderless, as incompetent in negotiations as it is hopeless in communications. The professional reputations of everyone in the directors’ box have been destroyed.

Twelve months ago, these people were riding high. They were the masters of the football universe in Scotland.

In spite of my many disagreements with how they were running certain parts of the club, those people could very easily have sat in those seats for the rest of their natural lives if they had only supported the man in the dugout, whoever that man happened to be, and let the football department do what football departments are supposed to do.

I still cannot tell you exactly what happened.

I still cannot tell you why the petty vendetta with Rodgers went as far as it did. I still cannot tell you why it was allowed to spiral into a destructive cycle. I still cannot tell you how a club known for professionalism, if not always for speed, allowed itself to devolve into this farce.

Celtic was never as well run as the board apologists liked to claim. It was never as competent or as forward-looking as those people wanted to believe.

But there is a difference between having serious doubts about your club and the direction it is taking, and looking at it now as an incoherent shambles.

That is where we are.

I do not know the exact mechanism by which we got here. All I know is that we are here. All I know is that we are in a truly awful position.

And as unpalatable as the possibilities may be, we know at least some of them must be true. There were people inside Celtic engaged in a mad experiment to see whether this club could continually do more with less. Or there were people inside the walls deliberately sabotaging the whole operation. Or the club is being run on spite and grievance against its own supporters. At least some of that has to be real.

Today, some of our players return to pre-season training, and no matter how hard the club tries to paint a picture of normality, nobody who turns up at Lennoxtown will be in the slightest doubt about how abnormal things really are.

The world outside no longer believes the people inside our house are competent or professional. The media now sees men who either lack the courage to stand up to Dermot Desmond or have willingly become his instruments. Desmond himself has been thoroughly toxified by this whole series of events, and many now view him as some kind of mad tyrant.

They can pretend normality all they want. Nobody outside the club believes it, and everybody inside it knows the truth.

Whoever turns up to take training today will know what has happened behind the scenes. If it is Maloney and Fotheringham, they will both know how disrespected they were. They will know how ungrateful their leaders have been.

So will every member of the squad.

If it is not Maloney and Fotheringham, then whoever does turn up will know that the people above them have no loyalty to anyone but themselves, and there will be no basis on which to trust those people going forward.

The players will know that too.

So, the damage is done, come what may.

The reputations of all involved will be further diminished by this whole series of events, and it should not leave any of us filled with confidence for what the rest of this summer will bring. A club that would haggle like this with the manager’s first-choice coaching team is not going to work quickly, or spend real money, or get the kind of rebuild this side needs done with any urgency. All the penny-pinching, all the amateurish negotiating tactics, all the strategic lack of ambition and idiotic practices that haunted us last summer will still be haunting us in this one.

It does not matter who shows up at Lennoxtown today.

Nothing about this is normal. Nothing about this is professional. Nothing about this comes close to what anyone would want to see at their football club.

This is not business as usual. It is business as unusual, which somehow has become the usual way we do business now. And without a doubt, reputations already on life support have been damaged even further by this.

We will not recover from it quickly.

God alone knows what it has done to relationships inside the walls. God alone knows what it has done to morale among the staff. I only know what it has done to the supporters, and we are not going to forgive them. We are not going to forget.

Whatever happens today at Lennoxtown, the people in charge of this club have shown once again that they are completely unfit to lead an institution like Celtic.

And the sooner we are rid of them, the better off we will be.

(This piece was amended at 10am to take into account the club’s announcement. Aside from that change, at the start, it remains the same piece.)

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