Sky was the limit for Celtic but now they seem stuck in freefall
LA guy who turned up in a blue suit was perhaps in the wrong movie
ESS than five years ago, Celtic were setting the controls to exit the stratosphere. Few could have predicted with certainty just how high they might be flying by the time the 10-In-A-Row sideshow had drawn to a close.
Absolutely no one could have come up with the reality. That 64-year-old Gordon Strachan, in the spare time left over from his day job at Dundee, would be back at the club telling everyone where it has all been going wrong and how he would make it right.
That Peter Lawwell would still be hanging around in the background having helped turn Celtic into irrelevant bottom-feeders in Europe and taken the hex off Diana Ross — with her fateful penalty kick in the opening ceremony of the 1994 World Cup — by blowing the biggest open goal in history.
That some guy from Scottish Rugby, who turned up for his first day in a royal blue suit and tie and left you feeling that John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in The Conqueror may no longer be the No1 case of ‘wrong guy, wrong movie’, would quit as CEO faster than you could say ‘world-class benchmarking’.
That a board, subjected to months of fan protests, flying crush barriers and spraypainted bedsheets demanding they be shot, should replace him with, erm, a long-standing member of that same board who, it seems, has been at the centre of making all the decisions anyway.
That there remains no modern football structure. No director of football. No head of recruitment. Just a 56-year-old GreekAustralian with no experience of the game in Europe as the manager, stuck with the same backroom team that sent ‘The Ten’ down the Clyde in a burning pontoon and surely wondering what on earth he has walked into.
Not even Nostradamus had the cojones to predict disasters of this magnitude.
The chink of light that undoubtedly existed after beating AZ Alkmaar at home in the Europa League has dimmed noticeably. Thanks to one Filip Helander header in an Old Firm derby, an injury to Kyogo Furuhashi and the mess created by the departure of Dominic McKay, the chief executive who was supposed to be modernising the place, for ‘personal reasons’.
Who knows what those personal reasons were? Maybe something to do with the fact that he stated, in a rare outburst of clarity amid the corporate speak, that Strachan wasn’t coming back to Celtic — just weeks before he did, in a shameful consultancy role held down while he is still employed by a rival Premiership club.
Listen, they might as well give Strachan that director of football job on a full-time basis now. Maybe even bring back Neil Lennon too. I don’t know why. To arrange this year’s mid-winter jolly to Dubai?
It wouldn’t be much more incongruous than bringing him back as manager to replace Brendan Rodgers in 2019, just weeks after he had left Hibs under the most opaque, confusing circumstances.
A large rump of Celtic’s punters suspect the club is little other than one big old pals’ act anyway. Heaven knows where they get that idea. Maybe the fact you can hardly walk around the place without bumping into a Strachan. Dad’s the consultant drawing up plans to reform the academy. Son Gavin is in the management team. His other son Craig is in the scouting system.
If his daughter is capable of playing left-back, there might be a contract as back-up to Greg Taylor for her too.
The word coming from Parkhead, of course, is that McKay’s departure will pave the way for big changes in the boardroom.
Whoop-de-doo. How about an explanation of why chairman Ian Bankier is still there after that video he made for the AGM last year, in which he stated the club started the season ‘very strongly, we qualified for Euro’.
Yes, they surely did. Thanks, in no small part, to being embarrassed at home by Ferencvaros in the Champions League diddy rounds. Just one of six seasons out of the last eight in which they have failed to get near the group stage.
It all just signposts where Celtic are and what they have become. A retrograde club, its hierarchy stuck in the past, running out of answers, turning to old faces they got a tune out of it in dim and distant times as they attempt to manage decline.
It is quite incredible. Quite incredible to consider just how spectacularly they blew all those huge advantages gained while Rangers were on their way back up the leagues post-2012. Quite incredible to think that Strachan — who left the place in 2009, remember, and is about to hit pension age — is now seen as the guy to provide long-term solutions.
Lord knows what manager Ange Postecoglou must think. Lord knows how he can be expected to succeed in this environment. He is still short of the players needed to patch up a broken squad and is now dealing with the tiers above him in the power structure coming apart again as well.
Celtic should have 10-In-A-Row safely wrapped up and be making progress on returning to a position of strength in Europe. Instead, they are established cannon fodder there. An irrelevance.
It just puts all the ambitions of five years ago into perspective. And the lack of drive and strategy that has led them to where they are now.
During that first season with Rodgers, a thumping at Barcelona aside, Celtic had drawn home and away with Manchester City in the Champions League. Had Callum McGregor shown more composure late on, they would have won in Monchengladbach in the group stage as well.
Six-in-a-row was on the way. ‘The Ten’ looked like a fait accompli. The millions were tumbling in. The model of buying players low and selling high was set — with Moussa Dembele, in from Fulham for buttons, set to take it to a whole new level.
Rodgers, with no need to look in the rear-view mirror at a chaotic Rangers, was focused on returning the club to the latter stages of European football’s premier competition.
He stated that explicitly. Dermot Desmond, the major shareholder, was the same. With the league pretty much guaranteed every year and the Champions Route giving a straightforward run to the £30million-plus bounty of the group stage, the path was set.
Yet, here we are now. Desmond’s interview last year in which he stated ‘Europe is so important as a yardstick of our progression’ could be seen for what it was after shipping eight goals in two games to Sparta Prague in the Europa League. His contention the team of last term would beat the squad that reached the UEFA Cup final in 2003 was risible.
Word that he was getting involved in signing the likes of 34-year-old Joe Hart in summer, a transfer opposed to what the model ought to be by now, was worrying. Whatever the reason for McKay’s departure, the abject failure of his appointment just makes you feel all the more that the club is still freewheeling dangerously.
It really isn’t all that long ago since the sky seemed the limit at Celtic. We could only speculate on where they would be aiming a further half-a-decade down the line.
Yet, as events keep showing, the people in charge lost control of the mission. With a voyage once intended for new worlds and final frontiers looking, again, like there is no other end destination than careering right into the heart of the sun.