Keane isn’t even the worst thing wrong with Celtic’s incoherent manager hunt.

Peter Lawwell used to boast that when Celtic were looking for a manager, he already had the names of three or four sitting in a drawer somewhere.

What happened to that boast? I’ll tell you what happened to it.

He did what people inside this club have a tendency to do almost all the time: he torched it with the words that came out of his own mouth. In the aftermath of appointing Neil Lennon in the showers, he said that a lot of people had been interested in the job, but he had simply put their applications in the bin.

And there went your pile of potential candidates.

Gone in the blink of an eye.

Because once you’ve said that in a public forum, you cannot backtrack on it. You cannot retract it. Once people hear that their interest was treated with such cavalier disrespect, you are never getting those people on the phone again.

This board is really good at that stuff. It is really good at blowing off its own feet.

Not satisfied with that chain of events, they did it all over again in October last year. Instead of letting Brendan Rodgers walk out of the club with everyone wishing him well, they shot him in the back and ensured that any person who asks Rodgers what it was like working for them will be told exactly how bad it was.

All the attention has focused on Robbie Keane over the last couple of days. That is necessary, because it would be the most contentious, divisive and shocking appointment in the recent history of the club.

This is not just a stab at a small group of supporters.

The loathing for this idea is widespread across a broad sweep of the Celtic fan base. They should not kid themselves about that.

There were people who, up until now, tried to remain neutral in the conflict between fans and board. This will be what sets them off and makes them pick a side.

And to those blaming fellow supporters for causing division, I have nothing to say to you at all. I have neither the time nor the inclination to argue with people too dumb to see that one plus one makes two.

This was not a secret. The sheer detestation of this idea has not simply emerged overnight. Everyone involved at every stage in the process knows this is guaranteed to cause division. So the fault does not lie with supporters who are angry.

The fault lies with the people who made this decision knowing supporters would be angry and just not giving a damn.

What those people really mean when they blame fellow fans is that they are happy with the decision and the rest of us should sit down and shut up.

Well, you sit down. You shut up.

You have no more right to say that to me than I have to say it to you. If you want to abuse that right, I feel no inclination to hold up my end of the bargain by pretending to take you seriously or treat your point of view with respect.

Put your guns away and I’ll put mine away just as happily. Show some respect to the opinions of fellow supporters, and perhaps you will deserve respect for your own.

But this is not really about the fact that a section of our fan base is thermonuclear pissed, although it is and has every right to be.

There is a lot more going on here than Keane.

This is where I will agree with some of you: he is simply not worth all this time and all this trouble. But that is rather the point.

Because who else is there? What else is there?

If you include Craig Bellamy on the shortlist, which most people in the media say we should, then what do you actually have?

You have an international boss who has never managed a single game of football at club level. You have a possible up-and-coming manager who has won two titles in two different countries, at the biggest clubs in those countries. And you have a 74-year-old man who does not even know if he has the energy for another full campaign.

One is a former manager of the club. Craig Bellamy came here on loan and played for a short time. Robbie Keane came here on loan and played for a short time.

Other than a Celtic connection, and two of them having been loan players here for six months, I do not know what these guys have in common. I could not tell you what the underlying football philosophy is.

One of them has no club-management experience. One has limited experience. One has all the experience in the world.

So there is no coherence there at all.

Presumably Bellamy and Keane come from an era where analytics were respected and grew up as coaches with that as part of their game. But with Bellamy, we will never know, because Bellamy has never managed a club and therefore has never used analytics to identify transfer targets as a head coach.

So yes, one guy who has never used them in that context. One guy who presumably has used them. And one guy whose peak in the game came before analytics won widespread use, and who has never really had to adapt to them or use them in any meaningful way.

Maybe there is coherence somewhere in all that.

But I could not tell you what it is.

The three of them have different playing styles. Keane has never spent long enough at one club to properly utilise academy talent and player development as part of his job. Martin O’Neill has a history of that. Craig Bellamy is new to the club game, so he has no history of it whatsoever. Nobody knows whether he places any value in that in the first place.

For all we know, the three of them have entirely different football philosophies. If you can tell me where that suggests a coherent vision, then I think you are seeing more than me.

Someone pointed out to me today that Liverpool took less than a week from sacking Arne Slot to hiring Andoni Iraola. Someone on the KDS forum suggested that when you are one of the biggest clubs in the world, and only a handful of managers will not immediately say yes to you, it is easier to go out and get the right person.

But I would argue the flip side is true. When you have all the choice in the world, you actually have an excuse for taking your time.

Liverpool did not need that time.

Why? Because unlike Peter Lawwell’s old claim, they really did have a list sitting in a drawer somewhere. A real one. A list with only a handful of names on it. People whose football philosophy matched that of the club.

Someone who could come into the club immediately and fit straight into the system. Someone who played the right style of football. Someone who believed in the club’s development plan and had proved it in his previous role.

So, they went to the top guy on the list and got him.

I would bet that if you were to find out who else was on that list, every other manager would have the same basic football skill set and the same basic football ideology. Because Liverpool is a club that works to a coherent, thought-out plan.

The idea that they would have a three-man shortlist so wildly different in style, ideas, experience and outlook simply would not happen.

Celtic’s shortlist is the giveaway. These people do not know what they are doing. There is no underlying structure to this. They are making it up as they go along.

Some twit arguing with me earlier suggested that it has only been a few weeks since the season ended. But it has been five months since Wilfried Nancy was sacked, and we knew we had to find a permanent replacement.

Go back further. Brendan Rodgers left in October. Although we know Nancy was someone’s bright idea, you would have thought the board would have had alternative candidates already in mind. They almost certainly should have. Why?

Because they knew Rodgers’ contract expired at the end of the season and he was not going to sign a new one.

So these people should not have started working on this a few weeks back. Not even five months back. Not even four months before that.

They should have been working on this since this time last year, when the season ended with defeat to Aberdeen at Hampden.

They should have been planning for this summer back then. That we are in this position now should be absolutely incomprehensible. It is nothing short of a disgrace.

I do not know the basis on which Desmond is picking the manager. I do not know what his criteria are. But it makes no coherent sense.

This is the same club that has constantly bought players against the manager’s wishes and needs, then thrown him footballers he cannot use because they do not fit the style of play.

That is incoherence at the strategic level, just as this is. That same incoherence is being shown right now in the choosing of the manager. Do not believe for a second that there will be any more thought-out or strategic approach towards signings.

There will not be. There is no chance of that at this point.

Once upon a time, these people may have had some surface-level understanding of the needs of the football department. Now they do not. Now they are years behind and fathoms out of their depth.

These people have no business picking a manager, because they do not know on what basis they are doing it. They do not know what strategy they are trying to follow. They do not know how all the various parts of the machine work.

I have described this before in the context of building a desktop computer.

If you give someone a sizable budget to build a machine, and they do not know how each component interacts with all the other components, they can spend a lot of money and still end up with a machine that cannot do what one five times cheaper could breeze through, because the cheaper one was built by someone who knew their stuff.

If you buy high-speed RAM and scrimp on the processor, you will never see the benefit of the RAM. All it represents is wasted money.

If you splash out on a gaudy, sexy, high-end graphics card but put in a cooling system that is inadequate and a PSU that does not supply enough juice, you will be lucky if you do not set fire to the house.

Either way, your PC is nothing but an expensive ornament.

Even the simplest task, like building a chest of drawers, requires a blueprint that tells you what to do at every stage. Without one, that thing will not stand up.

We run a football club like one of those dense, arrogant twats who gets a brand-new shiny thing that has to be assembled first, tosses away the instructions and sets about trying to do it without them. It is a recipe for disaster.

It is not only that these people will not follow the blueprint. They do not even know the blueprint exists. They do not even acknowledge the need for one. They really do believe they can just throw this thing together any way they want and let the manager sort it out.

When you have someone exceptional in the dugout, like Rodgers or O’Neill, it is not impossible that they can make something like that work.

Rodgers did it in his first season back, when every summer signing was a bust and he had to work with a weakened version of Ange’s prior-year squad.

Martin O’Neill came in and inherited what was left of the club after Wilfried Nancy had annihilated morale and, it seemed, blown our chances of winning anything. They did not even help him in the January window.

He had to do it with a depleted version of Rodgers’ squad.

But you only get away with that if you have the exceptional guy in the dugout in the first place. He does not want to hang around for much longer.

The other two candidates are nowhere near that standard.

None of them is in any way similar to the others. One is at the end of his career. One is just leaving the starting point of his. Another is a raw rookie who has never managed a club in his life. They have nothing in common, except that they all have a vague Celtic connection.

Is that the only work that went into this? Did someone sit down in front of a computer, type in “former Celtic players now in coaching” and print off the list?

Does it not matter how ridiculous it looks? Does it not matter that they have nothing in common? Does it not matter that there is no underlying philosophy behind it? Does it not even matter that one of them is so toxic to a large section of the fan base that you might have to do the press conference in a hazmat suit?

They have had five months since Nancy was sacked, and twelve since they knew this summer would involve finding a new manager.

In all that time, this is what the Brains Trust have come up with.

Tell me again why we are still trusting these people to run this club.

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