The Celtic soap opera season continued through the weekend. We were taken to the school of St Mirren on Saturday, then watched incredulously as a central defender we knew little about but who Sky incorrectly reported had signed a pre-contract, was instead heading for Liverpool.
Vasilis Barkas was dropped after the 2-2 draw with Livingston, he would be forgiven for being grateful as Scott Bain was given the unenviable burden of coping with a level of defending unseen at Celtic in decades. For the good of the player as well as the team, Neil Lennon has to accept Shane Duffy does not have what it takes at this level. A midweek pantomime against Hamilton went unpunished, while St Mirren fully exploited his meanderings.
In early December, I was assured Neil Lennon had the full support of the dressing room. Speaking in the heat after Saturday’s defeat, he questioned the players’ attitude and behaviour. There was no containment of the problem, no deflection of pressure off the squad and onto his more capable shoulders. Whatever goodwill exists must be under strain.
It must be difficult to find the words for so many post-match failures but throwing players under the bus is not the received wisdom. You and I are left to ponder what direction our season will plunge towards next.
Deadline Day in the ‘January’ transfer window leaves us with little to get excited about. We can hope for a central defender to fill the gap left by Christopher Jullien and a right back to allow Kristofer Ajer to move back into the middle. We cannot, though, buy confidence.
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Well…..
Podium, best Celtic news I’ll get today
Is he gone yet?
!!BADA BING!
I watched this last night /early hours this morning .
Do we do this type of training….I enjoyed it ….its 21 mins but its the sort of stuff i like .
JONJOE KENNY
PS ..for anyone interested have a look .
Scott Bain was given the unenviable burden of coping with a level of defending unseen at Celtic in days….
Fixed that for you Paul.HH
Has he left the building ?
Paul67 – “You and I are left to ponder what direction our season will plunge towards next.”
Yikes, that’s me well and truly triggered for the rest of the day…..
How low can we go ?
mmmmmm
HH
PAUL67
Who is signing the players were looking at ??
ONIL
No , he is working on next seasons rebuild silly ;)
Paul 67,
Hmmmmmmm.
Well before December many of us were urging ” non triers ” to be dropped. After Ferencvaros in fact.
HH.
PS :
DENIABHOY on 1ST FEBRUARY 2021 11:23 AM
MARSPAPA – have they got one of those videos for Duffy?
Naw, but I’ve got the one for Duffy’s dug which is sooooooo accurate.
MARKIEBHOY on 1ST FEBRUARY 2021 12:10 PM
Please say this will not happen…..
Even P67 despairs!
Hmmm! The bloodthirsty are out…good job I’ve got my head firmly stuck in the sand…
Still wondering how its at all possible for Lenny to pick his team tomorrow night.Surely that ship has now reached the Galapagos.Who will be eager to turn up for him on the frozen Ayrshire plastic.
Answers on a card.
‘But you can’t buy confidence….’
But you can buy competence.
On the pitch and off it.
Which, in turns, engenders confidence.
HH jg
Deluded
The Duffys dog video is wonderful.
MARSAPPA,
They are only loan deals to fill the gaps until summer.
Think we all feel the same frustration.
Long overdue establishing why and by whose hand we got here – and ensuring same people are not involved in any solution.
Mentioned yesterday, we are now so bad most fans are now aligned.
Suspect there are still a few who would advocate ‘do nothing’ approach.
“Preston Nth End chairman Peter Ridsdale told TalkSPORT they were contacted by Liverpool yesterday about Davies, they had to check because they thought the pre contract was done, but it wasn’t. Liverpool told they had a 2hr window to get a deal done and they did with a sell on”
None of us knows the details but short of forging his name on the contract what could Celtic have done to make him sign before Liverpool showed an interest?
tedious boring repetitive one line parrots
I heard this line on a podcast.
The people who created the problems that are now facing Celtic.
The PLC board , the CEO , and the manager are NOT, the people to solve the crisis.
Gross mismanagement from top to bottom.
Can we do a poll,to shut the place down,and open again in May when we have a proper coaching team in place, thanks in advance.
When you were assured in December that NL had the full support of the dressing room they were lying to you.
Celtic, Football Club. A team barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic team. Celtic will be that team. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster. Let me introduce you to the men who wil do it – Neil Lennon, John Kennedy and Gavin Strachan ” – Cut to assembled people jumping out of the windows or signing as a bit part for Liverpool.
UNCLE JIMMY on 1ST FEBRUARY 2021 12:17 PM
‘Suspect there are still a few who would advocate ‘do nothing’ approach.’
###
And some (well at least one) who harbour suspicions about the objectives of the individual who would be doing the doing.
Reading last Blog, ghuys bleating about PL dithering about Davies & typical Celtic, why wasn’t this tied up weeks ago etc.
Just wonder how many Business deals these ghuys have completed themselves.
To complete a deal both sides must be prepared to sign.
In this case Davies held all the aces, he was out of contract, he had all the options, the Papers said the deal was agreed with us & some said he had signed. As usual the Papers were wrong, I reckon that we were probably close, we are still a bit high profile & being linked to us gets your name on the news & alerts others.
We could have been used as bait or more likely Davies was prepared to come but held off signing till last minute in case something better came along.
Trolled by Liverpool.
Ben Davies , never darken our door unless you are on loan to the Huns !
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stephen.mcgowan
@mcgowan_stephen
Scottish football’s Joint Response Group have secured agreement from the Home Office to extend the current system of signing players from Europe post-Brexit into the summer transfer window.
Hurrah. I think…..
HH
!!BADA BING!! on 1ST FEBRUARY 2021 12:06 PM
Scott Bain was given the unenviable burden of coping with a level of defending unseen at Celtic in days….
belter..:)))))
CorkCelt,
I agree with that. Davies held all the cards (which is why he ran down his contract) and won a gold watch when Liverpool came calling. Bigger bucks on a few years will set him up with more than he expected.
Not sure what else we could have done before the window slammed shut….
HH
Monotonous single line happyclappers
CORKCELT on 1ST FEBRUARY 2021 12:23 PM
Can you define what you mean by ‘business deal’.
Ad nauseam (disambiguation).
Ad nauseam is a Latin term for argument or other discussion that has continued to the point of nausea.[1][2] For example, “this has been discussed ad nauseam” indicates that the topic has been discussed extensively and those involved have grown sick of it. The fallacy of dragging the conversation to an ad nauseam state in order to then assert one’s position as correct due to it not having been contradicted is also called argumentum ad infinitum (to infinity) and argument from repetition.[3]
The term is defined as “to a disgusting or ridiculous degree; to the point of nausea.”[3] Colloquially it is sometimes used as “until nobody cares to discuss it any more.”
Celtic is indeed a unique club . The only club to tolerate failure ….and in so doing , to actually encourage it .
If I didn’t see it unfolding before my eyes I wouldn’t have believed it .
My long term contributor and friend The Rumour GUy with his last transfer window article of this season.
I agree with every word. Amazing the people STILL making excuses for The World’s Sh@ttiest Poker Playing CEO.
——
This is a strange transfer deadline day, because this has been a strange transfer window.
I’ve written very little during it and none of it was on potential signings.
This isn’t really going to be a piece on signings either, because although that’s my remit here at The CelticBlog the simple truth is that I couldn’t give a toss and no-one else does either.
So we’re chasing some young loanees in a variety of positions? Big deal.
I suspect we’ll end up with some third-tier option designed as a crowd pleaser, like the baseball bat ned Declan Gallagher.
You know what? At this point, who cares?
This window has been exceptional for how completely it has wasted everybody’s time.
The club should have had a new manager in place months ago, and he could have spent this window weeding out the dreck and shipping out any non-triers.
That was its best possible use.
It has been squandered entirely, the predictable consequence of this board’s lamentable decision to give Lennon more time.
And then more time.
And then more time.
And then more time.
You get the drift, right?
Added to that, there’s nothing to play for in terms of the league title anymore, and nobody at Parkhead seems particularly concerned with the rest of the campaign. That guarantees us even more pain.
Like James I don’t believe we’ll win the Scottish Cup even if the tournament is somehow able to be played.
Our team is in complete melt-down. The club is freefalling. Continue as we are and second place might not even be secure. Yet there are still no signs that anything is going to change.
Everyone has chucked it. These feel like the last month’s of Trump’s America … the leadership has just flung down the tools and is leaving everyone to their own devices.
This has been the most horrendous mismanagement.
But if you stop for a minute and pause, and you look at this thing as just another transfer window, ignoring all the background chaos which surrounds it, what do you see?
To be blunt, you see the same dithering, delaying and incompetence we’ve been watching unfold during these things for many years.
It seems exceptional only because the conditions we find ourselves in are exceptional; in point of fact, this has been a pretty normal, pretty standard, calamity filled rush to the deadline day.
Celtic has been screwing up transfer windows for years now.
Lawwell’s policy of waiting until the very last available minute before he closes deals is a bizarre and dangerous gamble he has pulled again and again and again and it’s cost us again and again and again.
Ben Davies would have signed for Celtic weeks ago.
But Lawwell wanted a final day’s unveiling, a big grand gesture so as to try and convince people he still knew what he was doing.
And like with McGinn and dozens of others down through the years – players who almost literally slipped through our fingers – here we go again. Hopefully for the last time.
I can’t even muster anger at what I’m reading today, with us scrambling around for some last minute deal because we took the choice not to close our business in a timely fashion.
We are now desperately trying to cobble together a Plan B and weakening our midfield by letting Ntcham go out on loan.
Don’t look for logic. Don’t look for joined up thinking.
It’s been a long, long time since our transfer business followed any sort of coherent plan, and don’t look for one as long as certain people are still at the club.
This is another Lawwell inspired disaster, but I’m used to them now and all of us should be.
How many times have we come out windows saying “well we’ve decided to gamble”?
Too many to count.
We can rant and rave about the goals we lose from set-pieces and how Lennon never seems to learn certain lessons … well that comes from the top of the house, and it results in days like today, when we look weak and pathetic and amateurish and too slow out of the gate.
What’s worse is that it’s become so common as to be just accepted.
A reversal like the one we’ve just suffered over Davies should rock a club to its foundations and be a genuine cause for concern.
This is business as usual under Lawwell.
It’s happened so often it doesn’t even hurt anymore.
It’s happened so often it barely registers as a surprise.
I don’t know how long we had Davies on our list of targets, but we identified Alfie Doughty way last year, but didn’t close a deal because Lawwell was totally convinced we would secure him on a free.
That one crashed and burned weeks ago and we went on to repeat the same mistake with an even better player.
Lawwell is a blinkered idiot, still convinced of his own genius, and the board watches this guy do this over and over again and lets him get away with it. So we get what we deserve.
But the Davies fiasco sits amidst the flaming wreckage of an entire season and the dismantling of the myths surrounding this board and Lawwell in particular.
Those myths should have been revealed as smoke and mirrors trickery years ago.
No, there’s nothing exceptional about our disastrous failures in this window; it’s the way things are and it’s the way things have been at Celtic for a long time.
At this club history repeats itself over and over and over again.
This one has done so as both tragedy and farce.
I can’t fathom the upside to spending a penny on signings in this window. Unless you fear Hibs and Aberdeen. If you sack Lennon and put it in an internal caretaker, the players we have will see us through to 2nd. Give Ralston and Welsh a run. Keep the money for a summer warchest. God knows we’ll need it after Lawwell and Lennon’s singular disaster show this season.
TURKEYBHOY on 1ST FEBRUARY 2021 12:16 PM
The Duffys dog video is wonderful.
MARSAPPA,
They are only loan deals to fill the gaps until summer.
—————————————–
ACGR sent me the video , tears rolling down my face , hilarious.
As for the players loans or otherwise . I cant believe we’re still trusting someone at the club with what little finance we have.
They might have been bettered served getting more of our younger bhoys out on loan( anywhere ) for game time rather than rotting away .