On Sunday we saw the value of our two January signings: Julian Araujo won Man of the Match, while Tomas Cvancara scored the opening goal. Time will tell if February’s three additions will prove as effective.
Junior Adamu (24) is primarily a striker but plays across the front line. Like Tomas, he joins from the Bundesliga, where has two and a half years with Freiburg. Junior’s first season at Freiburg was spent largely as a substitute, but he became starting striker in season 2024-25. That status ended in November 2024 when he was red carded for violent conduct at Dortmund and received a three match ban. The player never recovered his regular starting spot after that setback until April.
Celtic have an option to buy the Nigeria-born Austria international. 10 goals in his breakthrough season in Austria with Salzburg got him the move to Germany. He has played a lot of football for a 24-year-old, so should be ready for the challenge of the Scottish Premiership.
Norwegian Joel Mvuka (22) had an anxious wait before his move to Celtic was confirmed late last night after issues with his medical. Consequentially, the deal was downgraded from a permanent transfer to a loan with an option to buy. You have probably seen him before, he made substitute appearances in both Europa League games against Celtic in 2022
After spending 18 months at Bodo/Glimt, he earned a move to Lorient, where he has mostly been used in right-midfield. I’m told he has pace to burn and will get up and down the right side to support attacking and defensive play.
Benjamin Arthur (20) arrived on loan from Brentford, allowing Stephen Welsh to return to Motherwell until the end of the season. Brentford have high hopes for the player, so there was no chance of an option to buy.
The others going out the door were Jahmai Simpson-Pusey, who managed to convince three managers he had no interest in being at Celtic. Life tip: recruit attitude before talent. Johnny Kenny leaves for Bolton Wanderers until the end of the season. Johnny endured a torrid run of form after such a promising display in the League Cup semi-final in November. You get the feeling his chance at Celtic has passed.
My big worry of yesterday was when Nottingham Forest bid £25m for Arne Engels. That figure has been Celtic’s ceiling, so any bid of that size would have caused serious thought, but with the title race so tight, it would have been too risky to sell a first-team player.
Under a different manager, Arne regularly started on the bench early in the season. The speed with which he went from being out of the team to being subject to a Celtic-record bid is fascinating.
The old mantra, we hope to leave the transfer window stronger than we went into it, was surely met. The squad lost fringe players and, even before yesterday, added significant value in Tomas Cvancara and Juian Araujo.
With Tomas, Junior Adamu and the return of Kelechi Iheanacho, Martin O’Neill has significant options for the striker role, which should allow Daizen Maeda to setting into the wide position. We are also hopeful of seeing Callum Osmand next month.
Kieran Tierney looks to have regained full fitness, while Marcelo Saracchi is back training and will be available for selection this month. Alistair Johnston is still some way from returning, but Araujo is a productive deputy, with Colby Donovan and Anthony Ralston as backup.
Auston Trusty and Liam Scales will be the focus in central defence; it remains to be seen what action Benjamin Arthur sees, or if he figures ahead of Dane Murray.
Martin is not short of options in the middle of the park. McGregor, Bernardo, Hatate, Engels, McCowan and Nygren have been used for the middle three positions. I expect might see Joel Mvuka in a deeper role – more like McCowan’s position than Yang’s.
Will it be enough? I would mistrust anyone confident either way on that question. With the two new signings we have seen, and the return to fitness of several absentees, in addition to yesterday’s business, we can at least be hopeful. One month in the roles, Martin O’Neill and Shaun Maloney have played their cards. It will be a fascinating end to the season.
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Computers can’t surprise – https://aeon.co/essays/sure-ai-can-do-writing-but-memoir-not-so-much
Creative writing used to be a human prerogative: do it well, do it badly, but either way endorse the consensus that to write about human experience was worth the candle and the coffee. Here was an essential human act, so much so that poetry formed a critical part of the computer pioneer Alan Turing’s original test: to determine whether an unseen respondent to a series of questions was human or a mechanical imposter. The Turing Test is often simplified to denote a single crossing point between two territories, human and machine. Pass the test, and artificial intelligence can stroll on over to our side of the line. Take a look around. Decide what to do with us. But, first, it has to pass.
In the paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (1950), published in the journal Mind, Turing set out his objective: ‘to consider the question, “Can machines think?”’ In true human fashion, he immediately re-phrases the question, at some length, and eventually arrives at the ‘imitation game’, modelled on a drawing-room entertainment from before the internet, before television. The original game he has in mind involves a guesser in the hotseat who poses questions to a man (X) and a woman (Y), who are out of sight and hearing in a separate room. The guesser has to determine from their written answers which is the man and which the woman. X tries to mislead, and wins if the guesser is wrong; Y wins if the guesser is right. Try it, it’s fun.
In this context, the first question posed in Turing’s proposed test is less surprising than at first it seems: ‘Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?’ Next, Turing asks, equally politely: ‘Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.’ Two questions in, and the contested boundary between human and machine thinking is already looking for answers in literature, in art. Turing’s 1950s version of X – the participant aiming to mislead – replies: ‘Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry.’ To imagine this answer, in the second phase of his game, Turing’s complicated brain is playing the role of a machine playing X, hidden from sight and typing its answers, pretending to be a man (who previously played the game pretending to be a woman). I know, but if the test were easy an air-fryer could pass it.
Turing isn’t suggesting that a machine can’t write poetry. In the convoluted logic of the imitation game, X calculates that in 1950 ordinary people didn’t write poetry, a commonsense assumption that every computer masquerading as human should know. Among other prejudices from the mid-20th century, Turing’s paper makes incautious references to race, religion and the Constitution of the United States. He likens the inability to see computers as sentient as equivalent to the ‘Moslem view that women have no souls’. Turing wades in: he doesn’t compute as we would now.
And neither do the future computers of 2026 that he was trying to envisage. Any of today’s large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT or Claude, can write an instant sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. I typed in Turing’s test question, and Claude 4 threw up 14 lines of poetry including the abbreviated word ‘mathemat’cal’, for the scansion. The poem made sense, and was formally a sonnet, and appeared in seconds.
Whether or not this counts as thinking, Turing intuits that the frontier he’s marking out will be picketed by the arts. In his paper, he picks a fight with an eminent neuroscientist of the time, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson of the Royal Society, who believed that ‘Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain – that is, not only write it but know that it had written it.’ For Jefferson, addressing the Royal College of Surgeons in his 1949 Lister Oration, mechanising the efforts of the infinite monkeys on typewriters didn’t really count.
These days, in the arts, it’s harder to share Jefferson’s confidence. The advances made by AI prick at artistic vanity – the work of a human artist can’t be all that special if a machine can replicate the results almost instantly. That hurts. A great human artist, we’d like to believe, amplifies and defends the exceptionalist spirit of our species but, in an echo of the anxieties that haunted early photography, a demonised version of AI threatens to steal away our souls. Encroaching on the best of what we can do and make and be, machine art intrudes onto sacred territory. Creative artists are supposed to be special, inimitable.
Turing’s Imitation Game paper was published 14 years after the first Writers’ Workshop convened at the University of Iowa, in 1936. Turing may not have known, with his grounding in maths at King’s College Cambridge, that elements of machine learning had already evolved across the Atlantic in the apparently unrelated field of creative writing. Before Iowa, the Muse; after Iowa, a method for assembling literary content not dissimilar to the functioning of today’s LLMs.
First, work out what effective writing looks like. Then, develop a process that walks aspiring writers towards an imitation of the desired output. The premise extensively tested by Iowa – and every creative writing MFA since – is that a suite of learnable rules can generate text that, as a bare minimum, resembles passable literary product. Rare is the promising screenwriter unfamiliar with Syd Field’s Three-Act Structure or Christopher Vogler’s Hero’s Journey: cheat codes that promise the optimal sequence for acts, scenes, drama and dialogue. In the same way that an LLM is designed to ‘think’, these templates are a form of reverse engineering: first study how the mechanics of Jaws or Witness made those movies sing, then identify transferable components for reassembly to achieve similar artistic success further down the line.
To a computer-programmer, reverse engineering as a machine-learning mechanism is known as back-propagation. In A Brief History of Intelligence (2023), Max S Bennett shows how this methodology has already helped in the development of image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, and self-driving cars. Supervising coders work to isolate the required answer in advance, then go back to nudge input responses until the artificial neural network arrives at the pre-set solution.
The mysterious magic ingredient has been debated in English on the printed page since at least 1580
If only writing were so simple. According to figures from Data USA, up to 4,000 students graduate each year with creative writing MFAs in the US. No one expects that number of Great American Novels to show for so much studying, despite the fact that many hopeful writing careers start with the prompt mentality invited by Chat GPT: I want to write a bestseller like the one that blew me away last summer. Or, for the more adventurous: something new but relatable, a novel/memoir hybrid with literary credibility and strong narrative momentum, like a cross between Lee Child and Annie Ernaux. Thank you. I’ll wait. But not very patiently.
Clearly, when the end result is compared with the original intention, the back-propagation method is fallible for creative writing courses and LLMs alike. To revisit Jefferson, as quoted by Turing, the finished work is undermined when inspired by the wrong ‘thoughts and emotions’, whether blind ambition in student writers or blind obedience in computers. Something more is required, and the mysterious magic ingredient has been debated in English on the printed page since at least 1580, when Sir Philip Sidney reached for the essence of exemplary creative writing in An Apology for Poetry. When it worked, he concluded, good writing could both teach and delight. It provided a guide to living well in a more accessible form than theology or history or philosophy. Creative writing was special.
Photo of an open book showing “The Defence of Poesie” by Sir Philip Sidney with aged pages and detailed text.
Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poesie’, in a 1627 edition of the Arcadia. Courtesy University of Glasgow Library/Flickr
So special, in fact, that no one has yet been able to break down the findings of English literature departments – what makes literature work – into sufficient granular detail to reformulate as instructions actionable by an LLM. Or by a creative writing student. Nor are the efforts being made in this area by other art-forms particularly encouraging. ArtEmis is a large-scale dataset designed to record and subsequently predict emotional responses to works of visual art. The scheme matches emotional annotations from more than 6,500 participants to textual explanations of what they’re seeing, and from this data ArtEmis hopes to enable the back-propagated creation of artworks that provoke equivalent emotional responses.
The understanding seems to be that if a machine can create a visual image that generates a controlled set of feels, then art will have been successfully created. Which sounds plausible, except human emotional responses are notoriously capricious. The ArtEmis procedure already has an analogue precedent in Hollywood, but if focus groups worked reliably for the arts, then cinemas would be full of bangers. It’s worth remembering that the 2023 strike action by the Writers Guild of America won significant protections against the use of generative AI in screenwriting, specifically disallowing the replacement of human writers by AI. This hasn’t noticeably boosted the production of great art movies. Human writers still make so-so films. Without any intervention from AI, we continue to paint indifferent canvasses and write forgettable novels.
Bad art is something human beings love to do, in vast numbers. It’s part of who we are, and when abandoned by inspiration we trust in the same methods we’ve programmed into LLMs. As predicted by Turing, ‘digital computers … can in fact mimic the actions of a human computer very closely’, and for the creation of failed artistic product we’ve taught artificial intelligence all our dodges. Creative writing that falls short, whether originating in a garret or in an Nvidia chip, ‘writes’ by selecting language units that commonly fit together, as recognised from published material available in the public domain. Familiar word combinations are assembled into almost convincing sentences, a tired use of language formerly called out as cliché. LLMs are cliché machines, trained on a resilient human weakness for generating maximum content with minimum effort.
This explains the headline in June 2025 in the British publishing industry’s leading trade magazine The Bookseller: ‘AI “Likely” to Produce Bestseller by 2030’. The headline referenced a conference speech by Philip Stone of Nielsen, a company that compiles UK book-sales data. I expect he’s right about that bestseller, because LLMs will come for genre writing first – police procedurals, spy thrillers, romances – re-treading identifiable formulas with proven popular appeal. Eager to please (‘Hi Rich, how are you today?’), AI also has the advantage, shared by surprisingly few human writers, of being able to churn out derivative product without embarrassment.
Fortunately for everybody else, the endless capacity of an AI to deliver rule-bound and resolution-directed narrative has an unexpected benefit: AI is the tool that will prove not all writing has the same value.
Writing has been reluctant to imagine new ways of reading, despite the vistas opened up by new technologies
To escape the dead man’s handle of cliché, readers live in hope for organic associations, speculative leaps and surprise inferences. Whereas, to an AI, which is fed the answer before the question, ‘surprise’ remains an elusive concept. This objection to machine thinking was raised as long ago as 1842 by Ada Lovelace about one of the earliest computers, Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (for historical context, Iowa’s first creative writing get-together, though informal, took place in 1897). ‘The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,’ Lovelace observed. ‘It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.’ Her italics emphasise the contrast with human thinking where originality, among artists at least, is a cherished value.
Daguerreotype of a woman in profile playing the piano, wearing a ruffled dress, set in a red and gold frame.
Daguerreotype of an 1852 painting of Ada Lovelace by Henry Wyndham Phillips. Courtesy Bodleian Library, Oxford/Wikipedia
The visual arts, more than literature, have kept alive the modernist imperative to ‘make it new’. The Turner Prize, for example, awarded to the strongest UK contemporary art exhibition in any given year, is permeated by a sense that if it’s not new it’s not art. For visual artists, formal curiosity comes with the job, exploring new ways of making to invite new ways of seeing. Writing, on the other hand, happily rewards the comfort of familiar forms, which justifies, in the UK, the existence of a separate Goldsmiths Prize for fiction that ‘extends the possibilities of the novel form’. Because most other prize-winning novels aren’t doing that.
Writing has been reluctant to imagine new ways of reading, despite the vistas opened up by new technologies. Transferring books wholesale to Kindle and Audible is little more than digital haulage, and makes literature, in its complacency, vulnerable to proficient AI re-runs of familiar material, lowering the odds on that imminent AI-generated bestseller. Writers, or more accurately their publishers, seem to have mislaid any sense of urgency around the importance of difficulty, or curiosity about the astonishing returns that formally daring work can provide. It’s a rare book proposal submitted to a mainstream publisher that dares promise a book that’s not like all the other books.
Lovelace, thinking about how machines think, instantly identified the importance of originality. Or as a Marianne Moore poem has it:
these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; …
Originality, in the arts as in science, enables the human project to move forward. Any discovery that is new and true extends the scope of reality. In this context, art that only pretends to be original won’t get us anywhere very interesting.
The Turing Test is basically a test of lying. Can a machine, adopting a recognisably human strategy, pretend to be something it isn’t? Passing Turing’s Test calls for an act of deception, leaving the deceived human interrogator vulnerable to primitive fears about impersonation and imposture. Art is supposed to see the truth beyond this kind of lie, and the original creations worth defending are in a category so extraordinary, because of the intensity and authenticity of Jefferson’s ‘thoughts and emotions felt’, that they exist in a permanent present tense. What Toni Morrison does is unbelievable.
Whereas what an AI does is probabilistic. An LLM’s calculation of the most likely sequence of words is the least likely way to create great writing. Anyone working at a more emotionally engaged level than statistical probability, genuinely creating new work, has a better chance of resonating with readers, however that affinity is expressed. ‘If literature is a street brawl between the courageous and the banal,’ Greg Baxter wrote in his memoir A Preparation for Death (2010), ‘I bring the toughest gang I know: the pure killers, the insane.’ Baxter’s literary gangsters do not kneel before the most likely next word. Baxter values his ‘pure killers, the insane’, while computers as envisioned by Turing receive instructions to be ‘obeyed correctly and in the right order.’
We can defy AI creep by encouraging the human ambition to make art, unassisted, whether successful or otherwise
I don’t doubt that LLMs can be asked to imitate transgression, but obeying that instruction makes them ludicrously phony and the enemies of art, even though in their advanced contemporary forms they appear better equipped to respond to Turing’s stabs at English literature. In 2026, for example, ChatGPT and Claude make short work of the Turing Test challenge of 1950 to explain Shakespeare’s creative choices in Sonnet 18. Why a ‘summer’s day’ and not a ‘spring day’? Easy (just ask them, they know the answer). LLMs now ace most of Turing’s original questions, and if they can’t write a sonnet like Shakespeare, then neither can I. That doesn’t mean I can’t think, and Turing makes the same reasonable allowance for computers. They too are allowed their limitations, and his attitude to machine intelligence follows the logic of Denis Diderot’s parrot: if the illusion of understanding is sufficiently convincing, it qualifies as understanding. The machines are faking it until they make it.
Or in Turing’s words: ‘God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think. I am unable to accept any part of this.’ Turing invokes God for the sake of the 1950s, but he rejected the idea that humankind is ‘necessarily superior’ to the rest of creation, whether man-made or otherwise. He sides with materialist philosophers like Democritus and Thomas Hobbes, seeing the mind – whatever it might be – as located entirely in the physical structure of the brain. An AI is a physical structure, leading Turing to judge that whatever an AI can’t do, it can’t do yet.
In which case, how should writers and artists react to this situation as it stands now? We can attach stickers to the dustjackets of novels saying ‘Human Written’, as recently trialled by the UK publisher Faber and Faber. Visual artists have labels that say ‘Created with Human Intelligence’ or ‘Not by AI’, and maybe hashtags can keep AI at a distance until a generational talent arrives to save human honour in a blaze of truly original style and content. Take that, AI. See how much catching up you have to do.
More proactively, in the meantime, the rest of us can defy AI creep by defending and encouraging the human ambition to make art, unassisted, whether successful or otherwise. Art is an affirmation of human existence, the transmission and reception of messages about encounter and connection. One inner life can touch another and, for best results, nurture a creative process that no LLM can imitate. Marcel Duchamp called art ‘this missing link, not the links which exist’, an insight that arrives in the 21st century as a straight refutation of the imitative LLM creative model, stuck in its feedback loops and repeating existing sequences. Not for ChatGPT the electric shorting between inner lives, which in writing is most readily accessible in memoir. What anyone remembers is theirs alone, an undigitised storehouse of authentic human experience.
When Turing was deep in thought, according to his biographer Andrew Hodges, he used to scratch his side-parted hair and make a squelching noise with his mouth. Inside his head, at around the time he devised the Turing Test, he heard sceptical voices telling him a computer would never be able to be ‘kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly’. His future machine brains wouldn’t ‘have initiative, have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream,’ and so on. Turing was making comparisons with his remembered lived experience. What AIs couldn’t do was memoir.
Taking this idea as my starting point, I recently launched the Universal Turing Machine, a human proposal for a new way of writing and reading. The Universal Turing Machine is an expandable online grid of 8 x 8 squares, like a chessboard, and writers are invited to claim a grid for themselves and fill each of the squares with 1,000 words of memory. The reader can move randomly between memories and voices, playing an equally active role in the space Duchamp identified: ‘art is the gap’. Twice a year, I plan to tile new grids to those already online, steadily increasing the size of this collective experimental memoir, amplifying the diversity of human existence and creating a subjective encyclopaedia of true-to-life experience.
The Universal Turing Machine format is designed to encourage writing as a mode of thinking, which is what the arts – seeing, listening, writing, reading – have always offered. A memory that knows it’s being remembered is up there with the hardest, cleverest kind of thinking we can do, and why, for the purposes of his test, Turing couldn’t keep his hands off literature. AIs can’t yet emulate writing as its own mode of thinking, or reading, or remembering, and it doesn’t help to learn to write by reading everything. Just as memoirs aren’t improved by total recall.
The communication between writer and reader, artist and audience, is the nearest we come to telepathy
To see the miracle of human artistic selection in action, consider the French experimental writer Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition (1969), or A Void. This is the book that contains no instances of the letter ‘e’, the kind of systematic constraint an LLM could replicate in a flash. What the computer brain can’t do is add Perec’s life experience. The letter ‘e’ in French sounds like ‘eux’, meaning ‘them’. Perec’s father died while fighting in the war. His mother was deported from Paris to Auschwitz by the Nazis. The two of them are missing from their son’s life and from his novel, which then becomes the opposite of a disappearance, drawing attention to their distorting absence in a triumphant act of artistic reclamation.
Towards the end of ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Turing unexpectedly mentions that ‘the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming’, and ‘If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up.’ The communication between writer and reader, artist and audience, is the nearest we come to telepathy: to transmitting and receiving information between minds. Turing recognises that his machines will struggle to match this human refinement, and although not everyone discovers telepathy through art, anyone with an individual experience of strawberries and cream can try. The effort itself is worthwhile, and encouraged by projects like mine: the Universal Turing Machine welcomes human contributors, no test required.
Or more accurately, to do the work of recomposing memory in writing – to think in this distinctly human way – is itself an act of resistance. It reframes Turing’s test in favour of the part played in his original imitation game by Y, who aims to tell the truth, and doesn’t seek to mislead. X can’t have memories on your behalf; can’t fake it, won’t make it, and a knowledge of self remains now as always an assertion of cognitive sovereignty. In writing the self, Y becomes convincingly human. Y wins. The boundary between human and machine thinking remains intact, refortified by a self that won’t and can’t be outsourced.
Sorry for wall of text. Thought some might enjoy and truly meant to only post link.
Aipple – LOL!
Was about to ask for a paragraph synopsis when I saw your next post.
So……..what’s the synopsis?
Sionnaigh, was up at the pie apple for a meeting tonight and Holy Mass before it, our meeting was delayed as we all participated in the blessing of the throat.
Hearts have folded like a deck od cards. After findlay made the error which lead to craig halkett getting sent off. At the end of the game, as players are shaking handa milne shoulder barges findlay as findley offers his hand. Their title challenge is over. It is between celtic & sevco now ro see who blinks first
Vatican Media Live
https://www.youtube.com/live/03pYP2Nmreo?si=H8GiqCQ7w9fnFOkT
Ave Ave
https://x.com/i/trending/2018826501366710357
https://youtu.be/jIkGuNh5874?si=K4nvjuIj7gUjmOPf
20min TIMS
https://x.com/i/status/2018735724086874448
Chas Mumgrew always decent on the GO RADIO FOOTBALL SHOW
I’m fully behind the protests, to try and force changes at the Club, but IMO it’s conflicted by the timing now.This is a crucial time in the season, we need to get behind Martin and the team on the park 💯, I don’t know what the solution is……..
They’re all must wins but now that the league is back in our own hands after last night, we simply must win. They’re a dreadful side. Aberdeen mid week in February, our new players will soon learn what Scottish football is all about.
the Bada Bing on 4th February 2026 6:40 am
The Board could immediately dial down the temperature by revoking the bans and announcing Nicholson is away in the summer.
Otherwise there’s no alternative but to keep protesting. Next season is just as important as this season, so changes need to happen or we’ll see the same again.
A boycott voted for last night for Saturdays game.Stupid,stupid idea.Wrong time,right target.
Have most people not bought their tickets ?
Quite rightly,they want the ban on the GB lifted.
This Board just blunder on regardless.Has there ever been such a clueless,accident prone,clumsy,dithering group of individuals.
Who on the Board can lift the ban? As far as I know by what I read,discussions aren’t even taking place, basically the Club is saying our rules do what we say. So where is the grounds for optimism for a resolution? They the Board have the season book money and after that aren’t bothered who turns up, This will continue to season’s end minimum without a compromise.
Watching McInnes cracking up I was reminded of Keegan v Ferguson when Newcastle bottled the league in the ’90s.
I don’t rate Rohl either, but compared to McInnes he at least has an extra six men in his squad – Beaton, Aitken, Dallas, Walsh, Dickinson, McLean.
Anyone who thinks the Irish in Scotland are accepted or even safe take a look at pictures of the fire in Irvine. A few neds, maybe? But this kind of thing could spiral. No green boots allowed, their woman’s manager calling our woman’s manager a rat, no eggs Benedict on the menu, a young German coach instructed not even to say the word ‘Celtic’. They hate us, and we live in a country that has tolerated this poison for a century.
QUADROPHENIAN on 4TH FEBRUARY 2026 12:14 AM
If all our recent temporary ‘acquisitions’ show up as decent players, we’ll have to change the song to:
“You’ll Never Mock A Loan!”
———
👏
Good morning CQN
Another fine day to be a Celt
Game day.
Bring it on.
Morning all,
Fwiw Oddschecker now have Hearts as third favourites to win the league after last night.
Tonight is a “must win” for so many reasons.
Dessybhoy,
Its just bloody mindedness now.Rage.
For me the worst part is,they act as if they are blameless.Maybe they think they are.Scary.Nicholson can lift the ban today.The man is a buffoon.There is no contrition from them for trying their hardest to wreck the season,every amateurish action.NoneTake it out on the people who pay their wages.
Shameful
A win tonight would be a massive statement.
Hearts have not folded like a deck of cards, what Celtic has is a chance to cut the points deficit tonight, Celtic needs to take the chance by getting 3 points.
TB
Celtic plc Board will not compromise, the empty seats will remain empty for the rest of the season , they aren’t keen on allowing in those who will show dissent about the performance of the Board of Directors, so it won’t happen and has been costly for those denied their seats. Where it goes , even if Nicholson Hargreaves are removed, new appointments will take place, the policies will not alter, the Club is run on the basis of being owned by Desmond even though he isn’t the owner, that is the issue until that changes this continues.
An Dún on 4th February 2026 7:11 am
Otherwise there’s no alternative but to keep protesting. Next season is just as important as this season, so changes need to happen or we’ll see the same again.
——–
I hear you AD .. but I strongly disagree.
This season is far more urgent than next.
That is a given.
It is also more important.
Why?
We lose this league to R2ngers they have a pathway with MED-HIGH confidence into the Champions League.
Their leadership will be emboldened by the outcome of their financial gamble (nothing new there) this season … and will be further emboldened by a potential increase in their financial capacity.
Their fans will also throw “56” in our fans’ faces for at least a year.
To your concern (and perhaps a concern of some of the collective, dare I say) ?
If Celtic win the league, is there a SIGNIFICANT risk of the board
(a) feeling largely vindicated and
(b) believing any rebellion will drift away like snow off a dyke because the team are winning?
IMHO – Yes, absolutely.
That puts those who are rebelling in a difficult position. I get it.
They need to own that (perhaps unfairly).
But if the fundamentals of the collective’s cause are strong enough? (I’m not convinced)
… Their capacity to re-infuse their campaign in the summer … to mitigate any stalled momentum from pausing while we have a league to win …
… Should still be there.
The Celtic Collective,on saying a boycott on this weekends game is the right thing to do,no its not we need to support the manger and the players ,we have a league title to win,scottish Cup etc,
So does anyone else have any better ideas on how support shows there not happy with Whiskers and his puppets ?
Turkeybhoy,
Yes the Board have to make a conciliatory move to co create unity that all fans (and Mon requested) for the run in.
Lift the bans and allow our fan media back to develop harmony and end the toxicity.
The barrier is that Nicholson and his partner Hargreaves are hell bent on eliminating GB, Fans media etc to silence justifiable criticism. Nicholson will continue to hide and devote all his efforts on this. The support who are the lifeblood of the club will never accept this.
The boycott call is a tough ask for the support but what option do they have when there is zero engagement and comms to find a (temporary) solution. Most seasoned observers will tell you that Nicholson will never beat the Celtic support and he has made himself Public Enemy no 1. Nicholson is the root cause of the toxicity that could potentially derail Celtics championship aspirations. That can never be forgiven or forgotten.
On a separate note on something else that is influencing the title race outcome. I fully expect Sevco to win tonite however it will include the helping hand of David Dickinson along the way. Dickinson will happily push Kilmarnock towards the relegation trapdoor to secure the points.
Where is the follow-up from our illustrious CEO on further discussions on Trusty red card “and other decisions”.
Finally still reflecting on a very poor transfer window where Celtic have strengthened but not to the level needed to ensure success. We are trading as if we have an £80M debt not £80M sitting in a bank gathering interest (and dust).
Celtic still remain second class in everything we do especially second rate people on the Board/Exec. Until that changes we will never be the best version of ourselves whether men’s team, women’s team, academy , recruitment, stadium.
Ultimately with mature professional and respected leaders harmony at the club would be restored. They would lead the club instead of the weak self preservation society we see today refusing to build a bridge with the support. Isolationism will never succeed.
So 3pts today and keep an eye on Dickinsons helping hand and how the media turn a blind whilst Nicholson shrugs his shoulders…
Keep the faith!
The GB is suspended from the stadium following this incident: https://www.celticfc.com/news/2025/november/07/supporters-update/
The video itself is pretty instructive. It appears as though the group was mobilised en masse to prevent stewards and Police from doing their work. Mob rule.
“This large group verbally abused and assaulted the steward and police officers, one male and one female, in a confined space and at one point there was a risk of one of the officers being pulled to the ground and trampled in amongst the larger group. The action taken by members of the Green Brigade group prevented the arrest of the individual in question.”
I have no idea what dialogue has taken place since, but clearly the group’s behaviour here crossed a very red line and I imagine that certain undertakings as regards future behaviour will require to be given before the group is permitted back into the stadium.
TBH, I don’t know if any such undertakings can be given with any assurance.
Pay for a ticket, attend the match, take your allocated place, behave lawfully, follow stewards’ instructions. It seems to be an acceptable compromise for 60,000 of us, but not for 200 or so ultra fans.
And here we are.
The crunch will come at season ticket renewal – and I suspect that the board are backing themselves to win that war of wills.
That said, I would think there is a good chance that we will see board and executive changes at the end of the season – either that or Celtic are in a downward spiral.
“…to prevent stewards and Police from doing their work…”
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so what exactly is their work? what is their brief when it comes to celtic fans? kettling? arresting? kicking doors in at 5am?
I hope and trust that all those supporters callung for a boycott would have physically attended the game if no boycott was in place.
It sort of dilutes the rationale of boycott if there was no intention to attend anyway.
HH.
there has been some equivalence drawn between the green brigade and fan media being banned.
just to be clear – the members of fan media are free to buy tickets for games if they want to watch the team. most of them choose not to. the green brigade actually pay money to watch the team.
i know which of those 2 groups i would rather be allowed back in the ground. they are not the same.
Maestro
The only thing he and they understand is money, so there’s the answer, tickets season books the lot, nuclear option and wont be acceptable to many , of course they the board stick to what they do run out of money to pay bills and could liquidate the club. This is a consequence of the way Fergus McCann sold his shares.
Imagine we win a treble. Long shot I know. But possible.
More realistically a domestic double.
So we celebrate and honour the team and our manager by a massive street party and then refuse to buy tickets for the next season.
Sounds rather contradictory to me, but to outsiders it must look absolutely ridiculous and bonkers. I can imagine hurty words like fairweather, entitled and spoilt being applied.
HH, the journey continues.
I think as a Club we have to focus on ourselves. We have more than enough cash reserves to handle Rangers getting CL football. Why don’t we aim to join them and plan accordingly ?
We can not allow MN to oversee another summer transfer window. He’s utterly incompetent.
BACK TO BASICS – GLASS HALF FULL
Sorry mate, see above.
We’ve bounced back from losing leagues to the hun and seeing the play Europa finals and make CL’s.
So we can handle them – so long as we have the right people making good calls.
Nicholson will put us back years this summer if he’s not removed.
From Celtic Collective
https://x.com/CFC_Collective/status/2018997699480006712
Not for me at this time.
HH