As Brendan Rodgers mulls over additions to his coaching staff, one possibility, Kolo Toure, has taken a position with the Ivorian Olympic team.
Kolo’s role at the club in the early part of last season, when he steadied a shaky defence sufficiently to see us through the Champions League qualifiers, could be reprised this season. Due to injuries, we’re short in central defence, while running with only two strikers until January (at least) seems tight. A Kolo-type figure may help both positions.
Scratch deep enough, however, and it gets more complicated. Kolo did well at the start of last season but was soon erring consistently, before being retired by omission. This was someone playing at the top of the game the season before.
Bringing in another experienced addition to the squad to patch gaps in defence or attack works on paper when you look at Kolo’s early work, but there are significant downside risks. The match fitness of anyone out of contract right now is unlikely to make them suitable to undertake hugely important games in the coming weeks.
Then there is the question of attitude – Philippe Senderos once looked like a good idea, but Phil took a red card instead of jumping for a ball, when his team needed him most. The small matter of money also has to be considered: Kolo was paid a fortune for his time in Glasgow; straight from the football budget.
Opportunity cost is another issue. Kris Ajer will not see a great deal of first team action this season, but his development would be hampered more with a 35-year-old team-mate on £35k per week as first reserve. And surely we hope to promote a striker through the ranks?
The final issue to consider is what will happen to the squad in the final week of the month, if Champions League qualification is secured and the transfer window gets into full swing. We were scourged for so long by squad fillers.
Sign quality combatants, able to last a season in the first time and with years of development ahead. This is where strategy has to be.
Listen to the new CQN Podcast below…
SUMMER SALE, KENNY OF THE CELTIC ONLY £10 – WWW.CQNBOOKSTORE.COM
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All aboard the Donald express…
Macjay …you have the court…don’t let us doon!..
……
Judge…
Braw.
Neustadt-Braw ,
yer havin a braw session ….;-))
H.H.
I am actually sober …daughter is in the sky…32 minutes she lands ..then I am back to being jist braw
Hoopy smiley things
(Thankyou for noticing)
Braw
NEUSTADT-BRAW on 11TH AUGUST 2017 2:41 AM
All I disruptively asked for was the return of Maggie Mc Gill .
And then ………..
Takeoffnland… :-))
^passenger plains ;-))
H.H.
Then I calm doon….yeh
Smiley airtraffic control thing..
East coast braw
Braw.
Mac ..while I am triangulating things of no consequence…
What is harder ?
Kieran right
Or
Keiran left ?
Smiley beast doom under things
Braw
Beast doom under things????
Crazy!!!!
NEUSTADT-BRAW on 11TH AUGUST 2017 3:07 AM
Beast doom under things????
Crazy!!!!
=========================================
Nah.
Braw.
Evening/morning all. Is our game on the the telly anywhere the night? Thanks.
BT Sport 1
VB
Thanks.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-15127389/close-up-the-most-scottish-place-in-italy
Never knew this ;))
HH
WEETWEETWEET
A lot of the Ayrshire Italians,that I know of at least,have their roots there.
There’s another wee place could claim the title-you won’t believe this one!
https://www.thelocal.it/20160302/gurro-italys-little-scotland-colonized-by-highland-warriors
AULDHEID @ 11:09 PM,
“I wasn’t meaning prove the motivation or what drove them.
I just meant show they didn’t do their job. The evidence of such is what is missing from the Judicial Panel in spring 2012 and LNS a year later.
Then in a review consider the evidence of such of which there is plenty.
Yes, I know where you are coming from, and of course you are right.
The 4 “Ds” are a great way of describing the SFA’S iniquitous approach.
How you frame that in a Petition to the CoS I’ve no idea and I certainly would not be so presumptious to tell folk how it should be done… wwwaaayyyy above my pay grade:))))
No, I was simply pointing out the difficulties proving unlawful against wrongful.
Completely agree regarding the Judicial Panel’s findings, which was of course undertaken in great haste and in my opinion had one main purpose – to make Craig Whyte the Patsy.
Even before these findings were announced and the SFA were (in public at least) taking their roll seriously, Stewart Regan stated the SFA President was heavily conflicted and the SFA would undertake another (more wide ranging) enquiry into Rangers, including Huge Adam’s claim’s and the myriad of evidence that was coming to light.
What happened in the next few days?!?!?! Because from then, as you say, until the publication of the SPL Commission’s findings a year later (via the 5wa) the whole episode was farcical.
So totally agree, this is the area that needs forensic examination… how that’s done? How to we get them to Commission a proper Review?
Keep up the good work, I know you guy’s persistence will prevail.
Hail Hail
My apologies…..only sober….. September & 11/11 does not match. ;-))
So the glorious 12th will be a damp squid this year.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-40888002
Good morning CQN from a dry and sun dappled East Devon.
http://celticbynumberscom.ipage.com/griffiths-bites-back/
The Hearts game, by numbers. As always with Griffiths less is more. HH
Good morning CQN
Good luck to the club tonight` born from immigrants
And I know I am an immigrant, in a way that’s changed me. But for the grace of God, I am that child on that beach.”
Stephen McGann is remembering how, when he researched his family tree for the first time, he discovered he had what he calls “slum blood”. “Ever since I was a teenager, I wanted to go back in time and find out where my ancestors came from in Ireland. My first question was: if they were poor and Irish, why did they come over here, to Liverpool? Why am I an immigrant?”
He remembers looking through a beautiful old parish record book at the age of 17 and reading that his great-great-aunt Teresa had died of “marasmus” as an 18-month-old infant in 1868, in a Liverpool slum. “I thought: oooh, what does marasmus mean? Then I realised it was a posh name for starvation.”
The teenage McGann, who would grow up to play Dr Turner in Call the Midwife, was immediately overcome with what he describes as a “weird passion” for genealogy. He solemnly promised his ancestors he would find out more about the history of the McGanns.
Fast-forward 37 years and we are discussing Flesh and Blood, the 300-odd page book that finally fulfils that solemn promise. In it, McGann, who at 54 is the youngest of the four McGann actor brothers, looks back at the history of his family through the lens of seven maladies: hunger, pestilence, exposure, trauma, breathlessness, heart problems and necrosis. He discusses how health and education – or a lack of them – have driven medical progress and social change in Britain, and how these changes have dramatically altered the fortunes of the McGanns.
“My family’s story is intimately related to the progress of this nation, because of the relationship between social history, public health and physical medical health. Until the welfare state, my family subsisted. After the welfare state, they thrived. I feel, in my family, the burden of the legacy of history very keenly.”
McGann, who has an MA in science communications, explains that genealogy is detective work: “You see these wonderful antiquated Latin terms on death certificates and very quickly realise that to understand the cause of death, you have to understand those medical terms in their wider sense. The purpose of genealogy – to gain self-knowledge, to answer questions like who am I? Where do I come from? – has to expand to embrace what a particular medical term means in that time, in that place, right there. I focus on health as an antagonist in the book because that’s the beat that drives the central characters on.”
Modern tribes: the amateur genealogist
Read more
He gives the example of another McGann death certificate, in 1865: Teresa’s younger sister Susan, who was only nine months old. Cause of death? Marasmus again. “You’re a woman living in a slum. Your infant child dies of starvation. How do you recover from that? How do you respond? What would motivate you to have sex that night with your husband among the rats, and conceive another child?”
His great-great-grandparents had fled the potato famine in County Roscommon, Ireland, only to be forced to watch child after child starve to death in Liverpool. “I think, inside, we carry a part of ourselves from the past. When I see a Syrian child’s body washed up on the beach, when I see a photo of refugees walking, I think: my lot walked, my lot starved.”
His gentle Liverpudlian accent grows stronger. “At the turn of the last century, my people were illiterate, they were still part of the peasant ghetto population. That’s not that long ago. When I look at my family history, I see how close I am to poverty, how close we all are. And I know I am an immigrant, in a way that’s changed me. But for the grace of God, I am that child on that beach.”
In the book, he details how the McGanns repeatedly survived starvation, tragedy and war simply by being prepared to do whatever it took to survive: “That’s in the blood.”
Owen McGann, for example, worked as an “emigration agent” – a conman who tricked unsuspecting Irish migrants arriving at Liverpool docks into paying twice the price for a ticket to the New World. His cunning meant his son Eugene didn’t starve to death as his daughters Teresa and Susan had. Instead, Eugene lived long enough to have his own son, McGann’s grandfather Owen Joseph, who deserted the army twice during the first world war, escaped arrest, re-enlisted in Australia under the name “Joseph McGann”, earned himself a medal and returned home in glory. But he would never again use the name Owen Joseph. Meanwhile, his brother James, McGann’s great-uncle, worked in the engine room of the Titanic and miraculously survived the sinking by balancing on the overturned hull of the very last lifeboat. It’s likely he had to fight off others who tried to board, to keep the boat afloat and to save himself.
McGann’s grandfather died when his father was five, so his father never had an opportunity to learn about his family’s past. “I have a very strong sense of my history now, and of my ancestors’ contribution to my current reality – but I didn’t have that when I was younger.”
Teeth of Irish famine victims reveal scientific markers for starvation
Read more
His father would tell the youthful McGann: “You don’t know you’re born.” “He was right. I still don’t – and I glory in the fact. Because my generation was the pampered one, the privileged one, insulated against the brutality of the slum streets, the beach in France and the lack of antibiotics.”
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His father had been critically wounded on D-day and was among the servicemen who were treated with the first mass-manufactured batch of penicillin. “I’ve always been very interested in the penicillin story because it saved my father’s life. My father had this adoration of antibiotics as a miracle drug. Since the battles of Troy, every soldier with wounds like my father’s had died. But he got lucky, he got saved and that’s why I’m here.”
This sense of not knowing he’s born has stayed with McGann, and he has always tried to instil in his son Dominic a sense of pride in his roots. “In a very male, pompous way that has probably bored him at times. I’ve said: ‘Look, this is what you come from. This is your slum blood. There’s possibly microbial resistance in your blood which comes from the slum streets. You are a biological product of these people. You, my lovely Russell Group university son doing a philosophy course and drama, this is your legacy, this is who you are. And the only thing I ask of you is to integrate and weave it into your self-identity, like I have.’ Hence the book.”
The process of researching his family history has helped McGann to understand his own father better. “I adored my father, but he was flawed. He resented my mother because she’d been able to go to grammar school. He was depressed, deeply depressed – and undiagnosed.”
Writing the book also brought him closer to his 81-year-old mother. In one of the most moving chapters of Flesh and Blood, he writes about the death of his twin brothers in 1957 – one stillborn, the other too premature to survive. His mother, who was just 21 at their birth, never got a chance to hold her dead babies and was never told by her husband where they were buried. Instead, she was warned by doctors she must stop grieving, or she would be given electroconvulsive therapy.
Stephen McGann as Dr Turner with other cast members of Call the Midwife.
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Medical history … Stephen McGann as Dr Patrick Turner with other cast members of Call the Midwife. Photograph: Coco Van Oppens/Mike Hogan – Sky1
“When I was writing the book, I went to see my mum, and we talked for hours about my brothers who died. She wanted her testimony to be read. It became clear to me that she was reviving them, and rescuing her younger self. She was saying to her younger self: ‘You’ll be OK.’”
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Writing the book meant so much to him because it’s his way of bringing to life the people in his family who had been forgotten, he says. “I’ll always remember going through the records, getting to my grandad and seeing he’s not called Joseph, he’s called Owen Joseph. And I’m thinking: Owen? His name was Owen? I never knew that. And then I get this really strong feeling, right there in this library. I say his name. No one has said his name since he was gone. Immediately, I sighed him back into existence. Because the moment you whisper their name, you evoke them again.”
He sees genealogy as akin to treasure hunting or archeology. “I dug my ancestors out of the ground. I resurrected them. The McGanns were lost in those public records, and now they’re not. So, yes, my father was right, I don’t know I’m born. But now I know that they were.”
Celtic By Numbers
11TH AUGUST 2017 7:30 AM
http://celticbynumberscom.ipage.com/griffiths-bites-back/
The Hearts Game…
———————–
That is some seriously great work you do.
Love stas and facts. And your observations are of Sherlock proportions. Don’t know where you find the raw data and the time to assimilate them.
Just keep doing it.
SUPERSUTTON on 11TH AUGUST 2017 7:45
Thank you
The data is all my own collected from watching the game so not such a hardship! But does explain why I am nearly 2 games behind. Just the way it is. Could do it quicker but collect less data. HH
LIONROARS
Very interesting stuff. Will strike a chord with many of us. But telling a 21yo who has just lost her newborn twins to get over it or it’s ECT,that’s f…..g horrific.
Hope yer fine and dandy and roaring away!!!
Celtic by numbers
I concur. Great reading. You’re doing a fantastic job. Wonderful contribution you make here.
Thanks
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cotswolds-village-residents-dna-tests-not-british-gloucestershire-bledington-western-european-a7886541.html
Villagers in the Cotswolds have expressed their shock after DNA tests revealed they were collectively less than 50 per cent British, despite the majority of them believing they had no foreign blood.
BOBBY MURDOCH’S CURLED-UP WINKLEPICKERS on 11TH AUGUST 2017 8:00 AM
Im doing fine thanks, hope you and yours are call well, i have stent procedure this Monday at the Jubilee then hopefully back to my roaring best
Next time you in your local ask all the immigrants to join your side of the bar, the British might be surprised to be outnumbered :-))
CELTICBYNUMBERS
Dunno how you do that,bud. Great stuff.
StattoCSC
Wow.
Two amazing – and amazingly different – posts side by side.
One, the analytical science of fitba.
The other, the essence of Celtic.
CQN on form has few peers.
HH jamesgang
Good morning from dull looking Glasgow sky ( who cares) from a rather slightly hungover auld Celtic man.
I will not be drinking today…….we’ll until about 3pm ?
Then soon after, watching the Celts beat a manager of the year candidate, whos team couldnt take even 1 point off the new club last season, despite that new club being rank roten ?
HH
LIONROARS
Bestaluck on Monday. No need for me to invite immigrants to the company-they instinctively know where the party is!
Seriously,hardly any of them would call themselves English using The Grandfather Rule. Those who would are Kippers!!!
BIGJIMMY
Only one cure for a hangover. Get yersel tae The Tollbooth!
We may not have sang New Seeker songs in the Jungle but we did sing Sacha Distel
“Screwtaps keep falling on me head….”
Lionroars67
Great post about Stephen McGann’s family. Thank you.
I did the same for my family a couple of years ago. He’s right in saying that when you investigate your genealogy it brings the members of your family who have gone before you to life. Causes of death, burials etc tell you a lot of the social conditions they lived in. It makes you angry, it makes you weep and it makes you proud of who you are and where you came from. It also makes you proud of them that they struggled to survive and fought to give us, their descendants, a better chance in life.
Like Stephen McGann, I have impressed on my family who they are and where they came from and told them stories about the hardship previous family members had to endure. The phrase his father used, “You don’t know you’re living” is one that I grew up with. It means entirely the opposite from the phrase I often jokingly use on holiday to my grandson when we’re lying by the poolside on holiday, “This is the life!” but he’ll grow up knowing the difference.
BOBBYMURDOCHSCURLED-UPWINKLEPICKERS
Thanks for yesterday’s horticultural advice. I wouldn’t mind some of those Orange Monkey flowers in my garden. MWD’s cat could come round and pee on them. :-))
MacJay
I note that you were in boisterous mood during the night. Your challenge to Mags made me laugh. Indefatigable!
I think the deal for Paddy will be complicated, Fulham had a few add ons when they sold him to Man Citeh.They will want their cut.
Doing your family tree can be quite interesting and pretty funny…
Especially when your family don’t actually know much about the family history like that your ancestors were from Cork not flippin’ Donegal meaning it takes you weeks to actually find anything. On the plus side they also don’t know any of the family secrets which the records laid bare…
My mothers, aunts and uncles and other relatives were shocked when I called their parents a bunch of b*stards…