SENTINELCELTS

Morning, all.

We have had some positive news from Celtic in the last few days. The club have finally reached agreement with Maloney and Fozzie to stay in position for next season and possibly beyond. We’ve also lured Ross Grant away from Hearts as our new Set Pieces Coach. He is being flagged up as a replacement for Gavin Strachan, who apparently was our previous set pieces coach. Nae offence, but none of us were aware we even had a set pieces coach, and most of us just wondered what Strachan did. 

I’ll mark that one down then as a much needed improvement. 

Meanwhile, all of the chatter on Timternet is about who will leave and how much we will get for them. Little talk of incoming, you’ll notice. I don’t actually think this is expectation management as much as I think it’s a sign of just how dysfunctional our club is. We are always on the front foot when someone waves a tenner in front of us, but we’ve ducked into the toilets when a signing opportunity arises. 

Today is the last day of the financial year. That means that any signings made from now on come out of next year’s balance sheet, while any in the last fortnight would have come out of the current year-a balance sheet which we will discover in about ten weeks time has been holed below the waterline. This is not because our beloved custodians went out and spent big to support an assault on Europe. They did the opposite, stripped what they could and pocketed the cash while undermining the highly successful man in charge. The fans initiated a merchandise boycott as a result, hence the holed balance sheet. The club responded by firing that highly successful manager, sending an SOS to a club legend last appointed over a quarter of a century previously, then bumped him off too in favour of some guy from a Canadian convent school or something. 

Cost us about £8m to hire and fire that yin. Plus 12 points and a league cup. And a showing up against the huns at Celtic Park. In our own home, to paraphrase a certain well known line.

Thankfully, sense prevailed. Back comes the veteran, et voila double in the bag. Surely we won’t make all those mistakes again. Last season, by popular acclaim, saw the worst squad since 1994, but we scraped through. It’s obvious the squad needs a major rebuild. We’ve got the money, etc. Naw. The only chat is about who is leaving and how much we will get for them. 

This isn’t because the Celtic fans WANT to sell a single one of them, btw. It’s for two reasons. One, we know that’s how the club works. Two, we know that’s how the club works. 

There is a well-worked pattern in off-field Scottish football, designed to soothe the fevered brows of the gullible amongst the support. One is that R2ngers win The Pre-season Cup, much coveted by their predecessors, and the other is that a couple of weeks later, Celtic parade The Glorious Balance Sheet. There are mugs amongst each support who have fallen for these ruses year after year, and while the occasional few finally come to their senses and go public without an apology for previously supporting a rotten regime, others still cling to the conviction that Brendan Rodgers is to blame for everything. 

Apparently it was his fault that Nancy was hired, because Tisdale insisted on the appointment being made and Rodgers insisted on Tisdale being appointed. I’m going to leave that hanging just there, in the vain hope that someone can make some sense of it. That Rodgers phoned the club and asked for a useless twat to be appointed as his boss. 

My article last week was titled tumbleweed. You tell me what has changed. There is nothing coming from our club that makes me think that we have intentions of building a side capable of competing in the Champions League. Yes, of course there is an outside possibility that the squad we have on 4 September will be good enough for Scotland, but that is a mile short of what a club like ours should be aiming for. There’s a list a mile long of clubs from leagues like ours who punch much heavier than we do with similar resources. Most of them sell their stars for more than us-but they reinvest. And they know exactly who and what they are looking for with that reinvestment. Every time. 

Every time. 

Every time they want better. More expensive than previously. A higher bar. More potential. All the things we try to avoid in our own race to the bottom. Aye, we’ll sign potential, we’ve signed plenty of it. If you judge potential as useless elsewhere, but cannae possibly be as bad with us. 

Think about that one. All those players with “potential” that we’ve signed. All those millions wasted, but we wouldn’t go the extra £100k to get a proper player over the line. 

There’s literally dozens of them. I’ll start you off with Mo Bangura and Amido Balde. 

Have fun naming others. Me, I’m off to hide the razor blades. 

<><><><><><>
Above article by BMCUWP