You have to hand it to the people who run this club, if we’re still using that particular expression to describe them; they are unrivalled at blowing an easy win.
The advantages Celtic have over every other side in this league are not merely large.
They’re enormous.
And that includes the club across the city, which is only even within touching distance because, once again, it has a board of directors willing to spend its own money to mount some sort of challenge.
Forced to live entirely on its own terms, as Celtic has proved capable of doing, that club would be nowhere.
I said some years ago that I couldn’t see where a serious challenge from across the city was coming from for the foreseeable future. I believed our structural advantages were so great that two things would have to happen simultaneously before they could even get close.
First, they would have to improve dramatically.
They would have to become a much better football team.
Well, you watched them today.
Do you think they are dramatically better?
Derek McInnes is their manager, for God’s sake, and for all he is swaggering about right now, I don’t think he is a particularly good one. And theirs is not a particularly good team, despite the money lavished on it.
The second thing that had to happen was that Celtic would have to go backwards.
Not only would they have to progress; we would actually have to regress badly enough to meet them somewhere in the middle … and then keep going down.
And here we are.
Once you conclude that they have not dramatically improved, yet they still have a realistic chance of winning this title, you have to ask just how far Celtic has fallen.
They finished third last season. If we had beaten them today, for all the talk about how brilliant they were last weekend, the situation facing them would have been grim.
Eight points behind. Out of Europe. And that would probably have been a fair reflection of where they are as a club.
But Celtic has somehow contrived to become much worse. That is the truly unbelievable part of all this. It is what we have done to ourselves that has put us where we are.
When you actually sit and think about it, the scale of the decline is staggering.
We have gone from Brendan Rodgers, a manager who had worked at the highest levels and who first arrived at Celtic with elite, cutting-edge, forward-thinking ideas, to Ange Postecoglou, another elite-level performer with a clear and modern football philosophy.
And now we are supposed to feel fortunate to have Martin O’Neill in charge.
A man whose career heights were more than 20 years ago.
A manager who is not modern in any meaningful football sense and who defers heavily to a coach whose previous managerial spells at Wigan and Hibs both ended badly.
This club keeps recycling itself. It has hired O’Neill repeatedly. It has hired Rodgers twice. It hired Neil Lennon twice. It keeps going back into its own past for answers.
Even on the final day of the transfer window, when Celtic needed a left-back, the solution was apparently to try to sign Greg Taylor, the left-back who had already been here 12 months earlier.
This whole club feels exhausted.
Martin O’Neill talks about being old.
His words, not mine.
But Celtic itself feels old. It feels like a creaking, ancient thing.
There is no vitality about this club any more.
It should be impossible to be in the position we are in with the advantages available to us.
Think about what it takes to squander a financial advantage this large.
Think about what it takes to be a football club with the cachet and resources to hire almost anyone who does not already have a job at an elite club, and yet keep going back to yesterday.
After the sales of key players in the summer, Celtic was sitting on a transfer budget which should have allowed us to blow all of our domestic competition out of the water and compete aggressively with clubs our size all across Europe.
Where is the benefit of it?
A club of Celtic’s size should have an academy capable of producing first-team professionals regularly. It should have cutting-edge analytics. Cutting-edge sports science. The best sports psychologists money can buy. A proper football structure. A clear hierarchy. People with defined responsibilities.
None of that reflects the reality we are looking at.
We have a CEO who is practically invisible. A temporary chairman. No director of football. A 74-year-old manager — again, his words keep reminding us of it — who was himself originally brought back as an interim solution and who, according to his own statements, is only here until the end of the season.
Everything about Celtic is short-term.
There are five loan players in this squad, and some of them might as well not be here at all for the amount of football they have played or appear likely to play.
We have no left-sided attacking midfielder worth a damn. We have a central defence which looks dreadful. We have no convincing cover at left-back. We have a midfield containing no fewer than six players, and somehow not one of them was capable of giving us what we needed in the middle of the pitch today.
After another transfer window which left obvious holes all over the squad, and with another trading surplus sitting on the books, the same weaknesses remain staring everybody in the face.
This is what Celtic has achieved.
We have done what should have been almost impossible. We have turned the Ibrox club into genuine title contenders.
They did not close this gap. They did not transform themselves into something formidable. They did not build some exceptional football operation which hunted Celtic down.
We went backwards. We wasted our advantages. We recycled old ideas. We failed to build modern structures. We failed to recruit properly. We failed to plan for the future.
We closed the gap ourselves.
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We’ve been saying it since the Bayern Munich game that we’ve gone backwards and made the tribute act and Hearts competitive. You could argue that before today, we won 13 league games in a row, we still have 7 games to play in Europe and we’re 2 points clear at the top of the league so the situation isn’t a crisis. But we are in crisis.
Whether the tribute act are any good is debatable but what is undeniable is that they’ve outclassed us twice in a row. We don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know what we’re doing. How much can be attributed to a collapse in confidence, hopefully a lot because we look bad at absolutely everything right now.
We are going into the break still top, looking down on the league. It’s 7 games in. If we’d had the start they had across the city, we’d have been saying all this a month ago. Sure, I’m as pissed off with what’s going on as anyone else, but if it takes reinforcements in January (I’m not hopeful there, but I do think if we are in a bad position in the table, they’ll come) we will still be top come May. It’s been the shittiest week I’ve had as a fan for a while and our exposure in Europe is frightening. The Ibrox club being all-conquering and us being in crisis is a media cum fest, we all know that. I find it hard to believe anyone disagreed with Spew Keevins when he said we had zero chance of winning the league, but we did it. We were somewhere just around pre-split at that time, I think. We are 7 games in, just 7 games in. It’s still ours to lose, as it every season now. Feel the pain and watch the results of the reset. We will be back and I for one will enjoy McInnes and the media cheerleaders drowning in their hubris.
There won’t be many of our fans that disagree with your article !
I really can’t comprehend or understand why our club
operates in the manner it does. Why has it never pushed on to completely eliminate Sevco?
It genuinely baffles me how this has happened. We have vastly superior resources, revenue, and fanbase — yet as the club that was liquidated in 2012 continually tries to catch us…we give them an opportunity by regressing every season.
Last season’s shambles has continued into this one and it’s hard to see at this point, as to when we start progressing again !
Our board’s approach is cautious, parsimonious,disingenuous and incompetent! They refuse to speculate to accumulate, and would rather stockpile millions in the bank, undermine management and be happy to just “keep the disco lights on!”
The gap closing is entirely down to our own board’s lack of professionalism, vision, leadership and ambition in every way, shape & form !
Shame on them all for undermining a succession of Celtic managers and squads, and treating us, the paying customers, with utter contempt and disregard!