SENTINELCELTS

When I was down the pub the other day to get my kicking off my wee hun mate after the LASK disaster, he surprised me by for once not jumping down my throat. This, remember, is the guy who has twice in three seasons celebrated winning the title in March, and famously assumed it was all over in September 2021 during Ange’s first season. 

Concerned that he might be unwell, I enquired why he was passing up an open goal. To my astonishment, he pointed out that I never slag him off when his team have a bad result, and that they still have a difficult tie on Thursday night. Wow, it’s only taken him twenty years, but I’ve finally talked some sense in to him!

I watched the McInnes interview last night, and not once did he say he was disappointed! Anyone get the feeling that the word is now banished from the Ibrox vocabulary, much as they finally ditched dignity? What he did say though surprised me, that the preparations for the game by the staff had been exhaustive and well executed. They had done their jobs. It was the players who had failed the club. 

I mention this only because on Tuesday night, MON took full responsibility for the shambles we had just witnessed. No throwing the players under the bus in public from him, even if privately he may have said otherwise. While I thought that his substitutions were weak, it has to be said that he didn’t have much of a hand to play. I’d worried beforehand about the prospect of losing one of our centre backs as well as Tierney, and this came to pass. Scales can play either LB or CB, but he can’t do both at once, so Dane Murray was called upon. Ralston too, as Donovan also succumbed. 

Three substitutes as a result of injuries to our back line kinda curtail a manager’s options. Should he have brought on Hassan instead of Tounekti? Most definitely. But he didn’t have much of a gene pool available in midfield when we needed it. And the midfield was the glaring problem all night, as it has been all season so far. 

It was jarring then to watch the interview from John McGinn yesterday relating why his move to Celtic in 2018 hadn’t taken place. It wasn’t something we didn’t already know, but it was like a boot in the bollocks to hear it all again, and straight from the horse’s mouth. Would he have made a difference on Tuesday? Probably not-we’d have sold him for a fortune long ago. I doubt there’s a chance in hell that Lawwell would have passed up the first decent offer. But a player just like him is what we have needed for a long time. 

And don’t start me either about our need of a big hard bastert to anchor our midfield and shield the defence. That gap in our resources has been glaring for years now, probably since Neil Lennon retired. We must be the only team in world football that tries to play like the Harlem Globetrotters every time, simply because we do not have the players capable of defending. Even the most limited of sides fancy their chances against us, and rightly so when the likes of Dundee United can get fifteen shots at goal and hit the woodwork an astonishing five times. 

The thing is, Tuesday night was not the responsibility of our manager. Take away the questionable inclusion of Tounekti and he played pretty much the only hand he could. The fault lies with the players who cannot hold position and cannot tackle, yes, but the main issue is that the board have stripped our squad systematically over the years while being too tight to cough up the cash for a proper talent like McGinn, and countless others over the years. Remember when BR wanted a CB and got Kompper? It meant that we couldn’t accept the £10m from Fulham for Boyata. And we lost him on a free the following summer. 

We suffered due to a pissing competition between Lawwell and Petrie at Hibs. We suffered due to Lawwell undermining BR by refusing him the players he requested and making sure that the biggest cheque he signed was for his own bonus. We’ve suffered since because the board didn’t like the cut of Dominic McKay’s jib-far too ambitious and forward thinking for their hidebound tastes, and too closely aligned with the ideals of his manager. 

We are still suffering because it is a point of honour at Celtic to lowball every selling club, even if it always means either losing out or paying over the odds. We are suffering because the board simply will not back the football ambitions of successive managers. And Martin shouldn’t act surprised. After all, it all started during his original tenure over twenty years ago. 

Unless and until the club hire someone with the responsibility to track down the players that the manager wants and needs, we are stuck with the same old shit on a constant rotation. We can almost certainly say goodbye to the Champions League for a very long time, and unless we start getting serious about building a proper squad fit for purpose, we can probably wave goodbye pretty soon to the Europa League too. As it is, we can probably wave goodbye to all those optimistic transfer rumours over the last fortnight. Especially if they were watching on Tuesday. 

The draw is later today. I’ll try to work up some enthusiasm for it. 

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Above article by BMCUWP