Without McGregor, Forrest and Tierney, who carries the Celtic flame?

You have to marvel at the people who will not learn from history.

Take just one historical example: the Stalinist purges, which stripped the Soviet military of thousands of officers through dismissal, imprisonment and execution for perceived disloyalty to the regime. Among them were experienced men who knew their soldiers, understood their capabilities and had been tested and hardened in battle.

Stalin did that at a time when uncertainty in Europe was reaching fever pitch, when aggressive German nationalism and the speed of German rearmament were becoming an increasingly obvious threat. He weakened his own military leadership as the circumstances around him demanded that it be strong.

Germany and the Soviet Union did not yet share a border. Having purged his officers and weakened his army, Stalin then helped Hitler create one through the partition of Poland. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was supposed to prevent German aggression against the Soviet Union, but only a fool could have regarded it as a permanent guarantee. Hitler’s ambitions in the east were hardly a secret.

When Operation Barbarossa sent German armies over the border on 22 June 1941, they encountered a Soviet military whose leadership had been damaged by those purges. Too many officers had been pushed into responsibilities for which they lacked experience.

Although that does not account entirely for the early disasters, you do wonder what might have been achieved had more of those experienced men been on hand to share their wisdom and knowledge.

It’s a single example, but there are plenty of others. Taken in a football context, the loss of accumulated experience is one reason rebuilds are so dangerous. You take a team, either one that’s winning or one that’s losing, and you rip it out completely and put a new one in place. Any new team is going to take time to settle and build relationships.

You don’t know whether the dressing room is going to get on or whether it’s going to tear itself apart. There are fewer established relationships, less shared knowledge and, if you have removed the experienced core, nobody with the same authority to guide the rest. You are asking the new group to discover all of that while the games keep coming.

It’s why a successful dressing room needs a core of players who set the standards, who know what those standards are and who drag everybody else up with them. Without that, you risk becoming a leaderless mess. You may finally, because circumstances demand it, knit together and discover some common purpose, but smart institutions do not leave that process to chance.

We are very fortunate here to have experienced figures at the club. But where is the contingency planning for when they leave? That’s why we hang on so tightly to the McGregor’s, the Forrest’s and the Tierney’s: they understand the club because they grew up in it. When they go, an enormous amount of what is called institutional memory walks out of the door with them.

That is more than knowing the history or understanding why a particular fixture matters. It is knowing what it takes to get through a difficult spell here. It is having been in winning dressing rooms, having seen standards slip and knowing what has to happen to bring them back. It is experience that the people around you can draw on before they have acquired their own.

That’s why, if you are smart, you never put yourself in a position where you have to introduce eight or nine different players to a team at one time. Sometimes, however, boards make huge strategic mistakes and end up having to undertake a full-scale rebuild. That leads to very obvious, very foreseeable and very avoidable problems.

When you leave too many jobs undone, you have to do them all at once. When you allow your team to become progressively weaker over a number of years, without improving it or adequately replacing the players who go, eventually you are going to have to act. And you are going to have to do it all at the same time, or something pretty close to that.

What you end up with is a lack of cohesion, of understanding, of partnerships and of relationships. It can look chaotic, and while you’re trying to make it all work, you are vulnerable. You are weak. You are susceptible to punishment.

Callum McGregor’s comments about a team of individuals brought that into focus for me. The coaches have to answer for that, as I’ll discuss later. But if we are struggling to function as a team while those experienced figures are still here, we should be thinking very seriously about what happens when they are gone.

As bad as the situation may be right now, it is liable to get one heck of a lot worse when we get to the summer if some of those building blocks haven’t been slotted into place. We could be going into next season without Forrest, with Callum McGregor turning 34 that summer and no real way of knowing how much longer he can carry this workload, and with Kieran Tierney already struggling to give us the full 90 minutes.

When the core of that team goes, it is not as simple as putting new players in those positions. You can replace a midfielder without replacing a leader. You can sign a winger without replacing somebody who understands the dressing room and whose experience gives his words weight inside it.

We have a policy under which, whenever a player gets to a place where he is good enough to sell, we look to sell him. But if we keep moving those players on without thinking about who is becoming established behind them, we make continuity harder and harder to achieve. We leave ourselves falling back on the veterans, and little by little we are running out of those.

Selling players does not remove the responsibility to prepare the next group. It makes that responsibility more important. Somebody has to be learning from McGregor while McGregor is still here. Somebody has to be growing into the role they will be expected to fulfil when his voice is no longer the one everybody turns to.

Imagine the summer in which McGregor is no longer there, Forrest is no longer there and Tierney may no longer be there. Imagine a Celtic without Martin O’Neill at the helm, a manager who knows the club and understands the club, and who provides his own version of institutional memory. Who is carrying those responsibilities then?

Look across the city at the attempt to import that understanding by bringing in people like Penrice and Shankland. It is what the staunch pivot was partly about: finding people steeped in the club’s culture, which we all understand perfectly well without having it spelled out to us. But you can’t acquire institutional memory simply by signing people who support the club. You have to have people inside it who have been part of winning teams, who have been through serious battles and who have been in the fight together before. Affinity with the shirt does not give somebody the experience of having carried its responsibilities.

That is where McGregor and the others give us more than what they produce on the pitch. They are the heart of Celtic. They are the keepers of the flame, and the question of who they pass that responsibility on to is not an idle one. It is a question we have never properly, as a club, tried to answer.

We cannot keep putting it off until another summer, another transfer window or another veteran’s final appearance. The people who will carry those standards next need time to learn them, live them and earn the authority to demand them of others. When the keepers of the flame finally leave, somebody has to be ready to take it from them.

We are nowhere near ready for the moment, and every day it gets a little closer.

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