Even Johnny Kenny cannot survive the Celtic board’s credibility collapse.

Here is the thing about credibility collapse that our board seems determined not to understand.

Credibility collapse is not a temporary problem to be managed as if it were an inconvenient public-relations issue. It is a disaster in corporate terms. It is a disaster for communication strategy. It is a disaster for any semblance of trust or faith in the institution.

Credibility is partly about perception. Indeed, it is partly perception and partly reality. That is precisely why you cannot allow perception to become overwhelmingly negative. Once that happens, credibility collapse tends to follow.

Credibility collapse means that even when you communicate something that makes perfect sense on paper, something so logical that it should stand out as the product of joined-up thinking, nobody believes that it was arrived at logically.

When the process by which you reached a decision seems messy, it becomes even more difficult for people to believe that it was not thrown together at the last minute.

When credibility collapses, repairing it is a long job. It is a sustained repair job. You cannot make too many mistakes along the way because every further mistake erodes whatever you are trying to recover.

I think this board has now gone so far that its credibility is irrecoverable, no matter what it does or how logical some of its decisions may appear to be. Putting people up front to defend those decisions as part of a rational process, when the process itself is plainly chaotic, simply erodes the credibility of those people as well.

This board of directors is brilliant at damaging not only its own credibility but also the credibility of the people around it. Celtic’s board now carries a toxic black cloud around with it, and to be on the periphery of that black cloud is to become tainted by it.

Later today, I will talk about the latest example of fan outreach: another car crash, another meeting full of dissembling, half-truths and evasions, another gathering filled with corporate jargon designed to baffle listeners and deflect difficult questions.

But right now, I want to talk about Shaun Maloney.

I want to talk about how our assistant manager, and, for all we know, current stand-in manager while Martin O’Neill recovers, sat in front of the media yesterday and attempted to explain how one of our fringe players is somehow now central to the club’s plan, even though all the evidence pointed in the other direction.

Maloney was asked about Johnny Kenny.

I wrote a piece on Johnny Kenny last week in which I said that Celtic should not make it difficult for him to move on and progress his career. We know that Bolton want to have him back. We should not be standing in his way if Kenny wants to go there and play football.

We are now told that Kenny has apparently been convinced that he belongs at Celtic and that Celtic has a plan for him. I wonder how many people have heard that before.

The reason there was confusion about this in the first place is because of some form of clerical error or administrative cock-up which resulted in the club’s official website failing to give him a squad number. That happened more than a week ago, and only now are we getting an explanation for it.

It is not that long ago that I wrote that, if Celtic were going to play with two forwards, we should have two backup forwards. Martin O’Neill likes to play his two-up-front system in a certain way, with one player responsible for creating chances and holding up the ball, and the other player there to put it in the net.

It therefore made sense to have two complementary target men and two complementary nippy forwards. It is obvious that Duran is in the nippy little forward mould, alongside Callum Osmand. It is also obvious that Johnny Kenny and Kasper Høgh are complementary in the same way. This is exactly what I said it made sense to do. To me, it was reasonable to keep Kenny around if that was the plan. Then the club failed to give him a squad number, the Bolton stories surfaced and we were told that Kenny was happy to go there, wanted to go there and wanted to pursue his career there.

After those two contradictory pieces of evidence, we were all entitled to believe that Johnny Kenny would be leaving Celtic.

Now, however, Kenny is back in the plans. Now he is part of the squad. The missing squad number had nothing to do with him having one foot out the door. It was apparently a mistake made somewhere outside the football department.

Like I said, I can see the logic in the idea, even though I am not particularly sold on Kenny as a player and I said as much in the recent piece. As part of a squad of four strikers, I can understand the argument for keeping him around.

If Martin O’Neill is determined to play with two forwards, then Celtic need two backups in case of injuries, suspensions or other problems. I thought that this was something O’Neill might revisit in the transfer window once the other priority positions had been filled. I did not think it was a major priority, but if Celtic were going to play two up front, I thought it just made good sense to have two capable backup players.

We can argue the toss all night and all day about whether Johnny Kenny is anybody’s idea of an able backup. Logically, however, keeping him around makes sense in those circumstances. From the club’s point of view, yeah. Not crazy.

But I do not know what promises Kenny was made to convince him to stay. I cannot imagine what those promises would be. He left Celtic to go to Bolton in the first place because he did not want to sit on the bench.

Well, guess what? He is going to sit on the bench almost every week.

I cannot conceive of many circumstances in which Kenny starts if Duran and Høgh are both fit. I cannot conceive of many circumstances in which he would be the preferred substitute ahead of Callum Osmand, who is obviously the young player with the most potential. If I were advising Johnny Kenny, I would tell him that staying at Celtic is a major mistake.

I am glad to have him around in terms of the squad. He ticks precisely the box I thought Celtic needed to tick, and keeping him is exactly the sort of decision I assumed Martin O’Neill would want to make.

But on a personal level, this is a waste of his time.

It will also be perceived as a waste of the club’s time for a whole lot of Celtic fans who do not rate Kenny as a player. More importantly, they will certainly see it as cheap option and another easy solution to a problem that could be solved by spending a little money.

Let us be brutally honest; the idea that Johnny Kenny is the equivalent of the player Celtic paid £11 million for, and that the two could somehow be interchangeable in a squad rotation system, is unbelievable, to put it mildly.

Nevertheless, I am not surprised that this is a step Celtic is taking. I am surprised that Johnny Kenny is willing to accept it.

And I am forced to speculate because this board has shredded its credibility. You have to take everything you hear from Celtic now with a pinch of salt, no matter who is sitting in front of you and no matter who is saying it.

I still suspect that Celtic are not willing to negotiate a reasonable price with Bolton. I think that Kenny would already be gone if Bolton had suddenly found money in the mattress and decided they wanted to make the move permanent.

Do I believe that the failure to give him a squad number was some sort of newsroom error? No. I do not believe that, even though it is so Celtic these days that it could almost be something from a parody.

I think what actually happened was that Celtic were willing to sell him and assumed we would and Bolton would not agree to our fee, and Kenny is staying because of that. We know, because his new club told us, that Paolo Bernardo only went out on loan after the Polish club had “walked away” from the negotiations twice as a result of Celtic’s unique negotiating style, which also popped up in talk about how we offered £4 million for one of our keeper targets … paid up over four years like a microwave bought on credit.

I wonder if maybe Bolton encountered the same sort of mindset, walked, and that’s why Kenny is still here. Of course, I may be wrong about all of this but it fits the known facts and is a more plausible story than “oh someone forgot to add his number.”

This is exactly how the credibility crisis now affects Celtic in every conceivable way. Credibility collapse takes down everything in its path. Nothing the club says is taken at face value anymore.

All of it has to be questioned. All of it has to be scrutinised.

Even if the club is telling the truth, the means by which we have arrived at the point where Johnny Kenny is now being described as a member of the first-team squad is so convoluted that it becomes another example of gross incompetence; Celtic cannot even get something as simple as issuing squad numbers right.

And that, of course, creates its own credibility problem.

It’s wild. What a wild summer this has been, and those who run this club have the cheek, the brass neck, to wonder why the narrative around Celtic is so negative.

It is negative because they have done nothing to inspire confidence. They have done nothing to inspire faith. They have done nothing to engender trust.

Everything is questioned. Everything is examined from different angles. Everything is poked and prodded because Celtic’s board has exhausted its credibility in so many areas and in so many ways. What exactly do they expect?

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.