Celtic blame Sturgeon for failure to land ten-in-a-row

CELTIC chairman Ian Bankier has accused the Scottish Government of triggering the sequence of events that led to the club failing to land ten-in-a-row last season. He claimed Celtic were ‘astonishingly treated’ when Nicola Sturgeon called for the postponement of the club’s next two games after full-back Boli Bolingoli went to Spain and then played against Kilmarnock after ignoring quarantine rules on his return. At the same time, Aberdeen had three games delayed after eight first-team members visited a bar and two contracted Covid, with the First Minister warning that the ‘yellow card’ she had issued football would be followed by a red. Although Bankier accepted that the club were their own worst enemy in what was billed as an historic campaign, he felt Celtic were not treated fairly by the First Minister and that the postponements had halted the team’s momentum. ‘I’m in no doubt that we had

the worst rub of the green that you could possibly imagine,’ he told the club’s annual general meeting. ‘You couldn’t have written it down on a piece of paper the number of things that went wrong. ‘I think we were astonishingly treated by the Scottish Government. We were the only employer in Scotland to be given sanctions for an employee breaching rules. That was the start of the downward slide, or the loss of momentum early last season, where we and Aberdeen were banned from playing for two games. It stopped the momentum. ‘We also had an undue course of luck in terms of injuries through international breaks. We had James Forrest out, we had a lot of things go wrong. ‘It was terrible, absolutely terrible, but I’m not shying away from the fact there were other aspects of the season where we just might have done a bit better, but we didn’t do.’ Responding to questions at an often fiery meeting at the club’s stadium, Bankier (pictured) was asked why he and his fellow directors didn’t stand up for the club over this perceived ill-treatment. ‘Well, if the First Minister of Scotland stands up and says I want a red card or a yellow card to be shown to Celtic Football Club, what is it you do? So, do you take them on?’ he responded. ‘We made our views really clear to the Scottish FA, which is our conduit for communication. ‘If you go toe-to-toe with an organisation with the scale, breadth and power of a government, you will almost certainly make things a lot worse, therefore we chose not to do that. We had to get back to playing our games.’ Celtic never recovered from falling behind early in the campaign and ended up finishing the season 25 points behind Rangers. Admitting that the problems at the club ran deep, the chairman said: ‘It’s hard to see positives. The reality is we didn’t achieve our primary objective and the bottom line is, as a board, we are accountable for that, as we were for all the other seasons. There’s no shying away from it. ‘We have analysed in great depth what went wrong and how we have got to the position we are in. There were lots of things out of our control. But there were lessons and we’ve learnt them.’