Lawwell will face the full fallout if bid for history ends in failure
IF Callum McGregor really thinks that the reaction to being played off the park at home by Rangers has been ‘absolute meltdown’, he’s in for a nasty surprise should Celtic fail to regain momentum and somehow concede the title to an Ibrox set-up with a markedly lower wage bill and a bank balance that isn’t even on the same page.
He’ll be locking himself in the house with his beloved Netflix and drawing the blinds in that event, all right. He might even want to get on the phone to Brendan Rodgers to see if the summer’s proposed escape tunnel to Leicester City is still open to traffic.
Blow 10-in-a-row and Glasgow will be as toxic an environment for McGregor and Co as Pripyat on the day Reactor Four went up in smoke.
That will be footballing Chernobyl. This, by contrast, is nothing more than a packet of Mentos chucked into a bottle of ginger.
Neil Lennon won’t survive as manager should Celtic let it slip from here. And it should also spell the end for Peter Lawwell’s near 20-year spell in charge at the champions.
That’s the enormity of what is on the line. That is what’s at stake in a transfer window the Parkhead club have to get absolutely right following years of one mess after another.
Their fans simply will not stand for seeing history permitted to slide down the plughole. And neither they should.
Celtic should be streets ahead of Rangers. They banked all that Champions League cash while the Ibrox club were making a Horlicks of coming back through the diddy divisions. They watched their rivals burn through further fortunes during those failed experiments with Mark Warburton and then Pedro Caixinha.
They have £40million in the bank while Rangers are running at a loss and shovelling money at this one, last attempt to shift the balance of power before self-sufficiency becomes the watchword. Going by the last set of accounts, Celtic are still running a total wage bill well in excess of £50m-a-season.
Yet, they have very much played second fiddle to Steven Gerrard’s side on their last two meetings — despite winning the Betfred Cup final through an offside goal — and find themselves still trying to paper over the cracks of what has been a shambolic recruitment policy.
They say time is the best judge of a transfer window. Well, let’s take things back to this very point two years ago.
Rodgers, then manager, claimed he was delighted with everything he got in the January market.
It amounted to Charly Musonda, Marvin Compper, Jack Hendry, Lewis Morgan and Scott Bain.
Six months later, the blessed Brendan had descended into throwing mud at the boardroom despite getting £9m to sign Odsonne Edouard on a permanent deal after a successful campaign on loan, ordering chief exec Lawwell to turn down £9m for Dedryck Boyata six months from the end of his contract and signing the likes of Youssouf Mulumbu and Emilio Izaguirre after missing out on John McGinn.
His training-ground bust-up on deadline day led to Celtic selling Moussa Dembele to Lyon without a Plan B in place. With Leigh Griffiths and Vakoun Issouf Bayo barely able to get on the park, they
still don’t have a dependable alternative to Edouard in attack — as shown in technicolour by Morgan and Mikey Johnston, for goodness sake, starting up front in Old Firm games of late.
By last January, the game was up. Rodgers was done. Transfer policy, if you can call it that, centred around committing nearly £4m on Maryan Shved and Bayo — both seen about as often as £3m hologram Eboue Kouassi — and signing a hotchpotch of players on loan to scrape through the season.
Lennon got them there. It earned him permission to buy Christopher Jullien, two guys for the same position in Boli Bolingoli and Greg Taylor and several right-backs. However, the Northern Irishman is still looking for a striker and, incredibly, a right-sided attacker at a club Rodgers described a year ago as having ‘a million wingers’.
Funds are there to buy big and Lawwell must understand it is more than just Lennon’s neck that’s on the block here.
Celtic, in football terms, have been skating on thin ice under his reign for a while and, although Rodgers’ appalling use of the market remains the core issue, Lawwell has to take his share of the blame for the failure to build adequately on what should have been an unassailable position.
He earned £3.5m last year. More than the English Premier League’s best-paid chief executive, Ed Woodward at Manchester United.
Yes, Lawwell’s remuneration did consist of a £2.3m long-term bonus on top of his regular £1.17m salary, but even so...
Sure, the balance sheet looks good. Despite missing out on the Champions League for two years on the trot now, the £20m banked for Dembele was great business. Kieran Tierney’s injury record suggests the £25m taken from Arsenal for him was even better.
But all that will mean little to Joe Punter should Celtic, with eight consecutive titles under their belt, fail to capitalise on this once-ina-lifetime opportunity to complete ‘The 10’.
Correctly, they remain bookies’ favourites to win the Premiership, but Rangers have proved more of a match for them than anyone expected and the mood around the club now reeks of a siege mentality rather than one of any great confidence.
Ryan Christie deserved his ban for grabbing Ibrox striker Alfredo Morelos by the short and curlies last month. The way it has been turned into the greatest miscarriage of justice since Deirdre Barlow got the jail in Coronation Street hints at desperation and panic.
Today’s announcement that Celtic are not open to cancelling fixtures ahead of Scotland’s Euro 2020 play-off tells you something too.
Back in early November, when things looked somewhat brighter, Lennon remarked: ‘Steve (Clarke) should get what he wants because the national team is a priority. The authorities should give him whatever he wants and needs for those games.’
Not now, clearly. Not when supporters are ready to turn. Lawwell knows this. What other reason can there be for him continuing to pander to the Green Brigade ultras despite their role in the 20 different fines Celtic have received from UEFA for disorder?
That record is a shocking stain on the club. Not as bad, mind you, as the dreadful handling of the sexual abuse scandal at ‘separate organisation’ Celtic Boys’ Club.
Add all that to the footage of the ludicrous Rod Stewart, who seems to have the run of the place, leading Lawwell and chairman Ian Bankier in singing an Irish rebel song and you do start to wonder if the Parkhead board are ever going to get their eye fully back on the ball.
Lawwell can’t expect to ride the storm if his side squander the league from here. And a storm it will most certainly be.
If it does blow in and bring down the house of cards that Rangers chairman Dave King occasionally talks about, McGregor will find himself far from the only guy with nothing better to do with his time than kick around the house watching boxsets.
A fanbase sure to go properly nuclear will make absolutely certain of that.