Does Celtic’s pre-season disruption account for the fitness and tactical issues we’ve seen?

There is something about this Celtic team that has been bothering me for weeks, and I know I am not alone in it. The players don’t look properly organised. They don’t look as though they understand what they are supposed to be doing in certain situations. And there are times when they don’t look fit enough to do it anyway.

We have spent a lot of time talking about the tactics, and rightly so. But the questions about fitness deserve attention as well, because if there is a problem there, we need to understand where it started.

And that takes us back to the summer, before a competitive ball had been kicked and, actually, before the players had even returned to training.

Because here is the thing about pre-season; the work of preparing it is supposed to begin long before the players arrive.

You don’t wait until everyone is standing in front of you in their training gear before deciding what you’re going to do with them. That would be ridiculous, and you wonder how well understood that is in the upper echelon of the club. I would like to know exactly when Celtic’s programme was put together and who was responsible for it, because we didn’t finally appoint a coaching team until very late in the day.

At a properly organised football club, pre-season planning can begin weeks or months beforehand. The coaches and the fitness staff work out what the team needs, how the players will be prepared and how that preparation fits the football they are going to be asked to play. By the time the squad returns, those people should know what they are doing.

That last part is critical. Because if you intend to play a certain way, you have to prepare the players to play that way.

You have to understand what you are asking of them physically, as well as tactically. You have to know whether the jobs you are giving them are realistic in the first place. And they have to be drilled in a plan that has already been thought through and scoped out. It cannot be thrown together at the last minute.

I have already written about the distances between our midfielders and the impossible demands those distances can place on individual players. You cannot solve that by telling someone to run harder. But equally, if your system requires a certain level of physical conditioning, then it is your responsibility to make sure the players are prepared for it. That has to start before the players arrive at the training ground.

So, let’s look at the summer.

Martin O’Neill was confirmed as manager on 11 June. The first players were back at Lennoxtown on 26 June. That same morning, the club officially confirmed that Shaun Maloney and Mark Fotheringham had agreed deals to stay.

Fifteen days between confirming the manager and the players returning. Confirmation of the assistants on the morning training resumed. When we’re now asking questions about how well this team has been prepared, those dates deserve a little scrutiny, don’t they? Precious time was squandered. We can’t get it back.

In that time, somebody still had to prepare for the season. Somebody had to decide what work these players needed and how it was going to be done. Who was that? And what instructions were they working to while the club was still considering whether an entirely different manager would be coming through the door?

Had the programme already been agreed? Had O’Neill and his coaches sat down and worked through it? Were they preparing for another season together while their futures were being discussed, or was some of that work waiting on decisions that should have been made much earlier? These are not minor questions; they are the whole story of how we got here.

They are the sort of questions you would ask in any business where the people responsible for delivering something were still being confirmed as the work was getting underway. At Celtic, apparently, we are supposed to look at the finished product and confine ourselves to discussing whether the players tried hard enough.

The actual training window was not unusually short. There were five weeks and three days between that first return and the opening league game against Dundee. That falls within a normal pre-season period, although international commitments meant that everyone was not back together from the beginning.

But having the time available is only part of it.

What matters is what you do with it, and when the team looks as disjointed as this one does, I think we are entitled to ask whether that time was used properly and whether the work was built around a clear idea of how we intended to play.

Then there is Kelechi Iheanacho, and his situation makes this subject even more aggravating. We seemed to spend much of his time here waiting for him to be fit, waiting for him to be available and waiting for him to be able to give us a sustained run in the team. It always seemed to be something we were working towards.

He is now in Turkey, playing regularly and scoring goals. Nine league goals, with a goal in seven consecutive league games for Bursaspor. Whatever else you want to say about that, he is getting on the pitch and making the sort of contribution you would expect from a player with his ability. Why he is now able to keep playing when that seemed to be such a persistent problem here?

What changed? Did he simply need the summer to recover properly? Has he benefited from a different programme? Is he being asked to do a different job? I don’t know, but I would like to think that somebody at Celtic is interested in the answer, because it might tell us something useful about our own work.

This is not about wishing we had kept him instead of signing someone else. We have forwards I am excited about; big Kasper, in spite of the rubbish being talked about him in some places will come good and Duran already has.

This is about looking at a player whose fitness was a recurring concern here and asking why his experience elsewhere appears to be so different.

And it brings us back to the same thing. Before the manager demands more from the players, I want to know that he and his coaches have given them what they need. I want to know that the preparation was right, that the instructions make sense and that the team is being asked to do something it has actually been coached to do.

That is the responsibility of the people in the dugout. They pick the system. They assign the roles. They decide how the team prepares for those roles.

If the players are falling short, then by all means tell us, but we are entitled to scrutinise the work that came before that as well.

But before that was a board of directors that left this to the very last possible minute, and they didn’t care about that because on a fundamental level these people do not have a clue how football works, or that the work needs to start long before the players are back in the building. They do not have a clue about any of this.

Now, let’s be honest; we do not have the fitness data. A player can look exhausted because he is being asked to cover too much ground, because the support isn’t there or because the whole shape of the team is wrong. As I have said already, there are times when our system appears to demand that somebody be in two places at once, and no pre-season programme is going to give him that particular ability.

So, we cannot conclusively separate a fitness problem from a coaching problem, or establish how much one might be making the other worse.

But if the preparation was right and the coaching is right, somebody needs to explain why so much of what we are watching looks wrong.

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