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Celtic's plasticine empire is collapsing amid arrogance and awful decisions


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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jan/12/celtic-plasticine-empire-is-collapsing-amid-arrogance-and-awful-decisions-apologise-dubai

the club should apologise for a Dubai trip that has disfigured a season already notable for toil on the pitch and mess off it

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Celtic: The Implosion. The imagination of a scriptwriting genius would have been necessary to piece together a chain of events which are now far enough removed from fiction as to fatally undermine what was billed as a history-making season.

Grand plans relating to a 10th title in a row are long gone; instead, Celtic’s collective decision-making has reduced the club to a laughing stock. Their supporters, normally so fiercely defensive of reputation, have been united in horror at the unravelling of a setup which appeared untouchable 12 months ago. It really didn’t take much to topple this plasticine empire.

Celtic draw with Hibs despite 13 players isolating after positive Covid-19 test

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There are dismal multimillion-pound transfer episodes, the case of the left-back who breached travel rules for a holiday in Spain without the club’s knowledge, rows from Nicola Sturgeon, European embarrassment at the hands of Ferencvaros and Europa League teams who rattled in 19 goals in six group matches, even before we get to rampaging supporters outside Celtic Park as domestic dominance began to disintegrate. Just when such noise had calmed to the point of acceptance – Rangers’ win in the Old Firm game of 2 January secured the title in all but name – came a trip to Dubai and fallout which renders “ill-advised” as understatement of the year.

By the time Celtic took to the pitch against Hibernian on Monday night, 13 players and three coaches – including Neil Lennon, the manager - were in isolation. Celtic’s season-ticket holders, handed a streaming code for their money, watched a reserve team limp to a 1-1 draw as Lennon issued instructions to substitutes via air pods.

It sums up the incredible scenario that Christopher Jullien, taken to Dubai despite a long-term injury, was the player to test positive for Covid-19 and attract the attention of track and trace teams. Were it Celtic – and not Rangers – holding a 21-point advantage then fans really wouldn’t care less about Dubai and associated drama. But here we are: Celtic are toiling on the pitch and an unholy mess off it. Rangers’ league form has been exemplary but Steven Gerrard must be laughing himself silly.

Celtic’s board detest any charge of complacency. The club object to any assertion that their self-proclaimed scale is undermined by two-bit behaviour. Yet it is impossible to foresee any situation whereby Dermot Desmond, the absentee landlord, would abide by such gross mismanagement at any of his other businesses. Celtic’s Dubai shambles is indicative of dreadful decision-making and a culture of arrogance.

Celtic’s defeat at Rangers on 2 January effectively ended their title hopes. Photograph: Stuart Wallace/BPI/Shutterstock

It cannot be emphasised often enough that Celtic should be in a different competitive stratosphere to this, owing to the years of leeway afforded by Rangers’ financial implosion. Instead, punters lapped up thrashings of Hamilton Accies as directors presided over managed decline. The means by which this has all come to a head is spectacular but the signs have been there for years. Lennon was offered his job in the dressing-room showers after a cup final.

The Celtic statement that confirmed the housebound status of the Dubai 16 was as extraordinary as it was audacious. Rather than offer any hint of remorse, this served as a reminder of an entitlement culture. “The reality is that a case could well have occurred had the team remained in Scotland, as other cases have done in Scottish football and across UK sport in the past week,” it read. A club founded on grounds of decency and compassion has acted with blatant disregard for a troubled, wider picture in needlessly swanning off on a charter flight to the Middle East mid-pandemic. They go to Dubai every year, so why not go again? This is the attitude of a petulant teenager, with chutzpah boosted by the scores of observers too scared to criticise such a prominent entity.

John Kennedy, Celtic’s assistant manager, reported on Saturday that Shane Duffy would “miss the [Hibs] game because he’s left the bubble”. Duffy had departed Dubai early to attend to personal matters. By Monday night, the Irishman was playing at centre-back.

 

 

Celtic’s manager Neil Lennon (right) and his assistant John Kennedy. Photograph: Fabrizio Carabelli/PA

Scottish clubs have indeed returned positive Covid cases, without the necessity for such a tally of isolations. Celtic aren’t at all used to being told they are in the wrong; and certainly not from Scottish football officialdom. Their level of power may well distort perspectives. An apology to Celtic’s supporters should have opened any bulletin. Instead? Hubris.

There are two strands to the Celtic trip. On the one hand, it was chronically tone deaf against a backdrop of severe restrictions at home and on-field underperformance. On the other, it looks from this distance that it was crazily inviting coronavirus risk. Celtic don’t fly to any domestic fixture.

As photos emerged of an apparently “relaxed” environment, scrutiny only intensified. “I do have doubts, based on how the club itself described it, about whether Celtic’s trip to Dubai was really essential,” said Sturgeon. “I have doubts based on some pictures I’ve seen whether adherence to bubble rules was strict enough.” Celtic didn’t break laws but they abused the spirit of them.

Gavin Strachan, left in dugout charge against Hibs, doubled down on the club’s stance. He said: “There’s regret that one person has caught the virus but there’s not a regret in terms of the permission we got to go and the protocols that we followed, which we have done the whole season. It’s regrettable that we got one positive, which we could have got at any time.

“It’s a trip that’s been done over the last few years and it has yielded very positive results, so the thinking behind it was to maintain that and try to galvanise and push in the second half of the season.” It may have escaped Strachan’s attention that a number of things deemed absolutely fine “over the last few years” are off the table for now.

Celtic training last week in Dubai. Photograph: @CelticFC/twitter

Andy Walker, a man immersed in Celtic, was wonderfully coruscating during Sky’s Monday night coverage. “What the Celtic support deserve is a bit of contrition from someone with a bit of backbone at this club,” said the former striker. “They are being short-changed and it’s completely unacceptable.”

This mess leaves the Scottish Professional Football League – unimpressive enough in normal times, let alone a crisis – in something of a pickle. After St Mirren and Kilmarnock couldn’t play fixtures earlier in the season, 3-0 victories were handed to opponents. The clubs appealed. Boxing Day – months after the fixtures in question – saw a hilarious but necessary reconfiguration of the table on account of said appeals.

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Not only did the SPFL allow Celtic to skip over to Dubai, the league moved the Hibs match – much to the chagrin of the Edinburgh club – to facilitate it. At the point this nonsense was taking place, Celtic held two matches in hand. Neil Doncaster, the SPFL chief executive, had previously been very uptight about scheduling. Celtic were allowed to knock out midweeks while behind in fixtures on the basis of winter sun.

The SPFL appears far more interested in Covid outcomes than causes, especially with regards small clubs with small squads. Celtic played Hibs, hence the integrity of the competition and image damage beyond that don’t apparently matter. Hibs asked for retesting at Celtic, a perfectly valid request even on an optics level, and were refused by their opponents and the SPFL. There is total silence from Doncaster, his chairman Murdoch MacLennan and non-executive directors implicated in yet another farce. This is, however, predictable.

Dubai will for ever serve as an inauspicious reference point in this Celtic campaign of 2020-21. Even in this, such a fickle business, it will take a lot for the club’s support to turn back on-side. The sequel will only depict a happy place if Celtic admit to glaring failings.

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For us the only way is up. in Scotland and more importantly Europe.

For cellic, no matter what  Scottish covid infested trophies they win, this will live with them for years, with probably more serious stuff on the horizon in the short term (covid) and the long term, (mis-management and child abuse) to add.

It's magic you know, never be 10 in a row. 

 

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I see Charlie Nicholas has referred to Lawwell as Celtic's Murray and I think he probably has a point.

There's a lesson to be learned that you can have everyone eating out of your palm for 9/10 years but as soon as you get ahead of yourself and become arrogant thinking you will get your own way all the time you will get turned on pretty quickly as soon as they smell blood.

 

 

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Really good article. 

It's been brillant watching them go from one disaster to another. 

This is just the now as well. The damage they have done here could last for seasons to come. 

We've got a real opportunity to build a new era of dominance, while they go back to where they belong. 

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Great article. Really gets to the heart of the  best thing about all this: they’ve thrown away nearly a decade of total dominance which should have seen them top of the tree forever, through the sheer arrogance of the entire club, from boardroom right down to fans. Glorious.

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You know it's bad when even Tom English is putting the boot in on BBC.

 

On their trip to Dubai, Celtic did it in style. A private charter out of Glasgow and five nights at the exclusive Royal Meridien Beach Resort with its views of the Arabian Gulf, its 14 restaurants, its award-winning chefs, its 19 acres of landscaped gardens and its three swimming pools.

The hotel of champions with a room rate to match. Those with experience of such things have estimated Celtic's trip at around the £250,000 mark.

We're told they trained hard out there, that in this paradise from Paradise they got through a body of work they couldn't have achieved had they done what all other teams in Scotland did and stayed at home. Clearly, none of it helped them in the earthier environs of the east end of Glasgow on Monday night.

A free-kick needlessly given away in the dying minutes against Hibs, a group of players unable to deal with Stevie Mallan's delivery, a goalkeeper flapping, a defender panicking. Four errors in one passage of play. Did they not practise defending in Dubai? Unlike some of his opponents, Kevin Nisbet didn't get much heat on his back last week, but his emphatic finish would have left him with the same kind of warm glow you might get when sitting poolside with a beer at a five-star hotel in the sun.

How the landscape has changed. A year ago it was Rangers who imploded upon their return from Dubai and now it's Celtic. A year ago it was Celtic who went roaring away to the title and now it's Rangers. A year ago all the questions about mentality and decision-making and management were asked of the Ibrox board, Steven Gerrard and his players and now those same questions are being asked of Peter Lawwell, Neil Lennon and his players.

This dismal season of theirs has thrown up a number of grim moments, from the Champions League exit against Ferencvaros, to the Europa League maulings against Sparta Prague, to the domestic losses against Rangers and Ross County and the ugly scenes that happened in that period.

All of those told us much about the deterioration in playing standards, but the mental image of the manager, the assistant, the captain, the chief goalscorer and a dozen others watching the game against Hibs from the self-isolation of their own living room is an illustration of how awry things have become elsewhere in the club.

They might have left their problems behind for the guts of a week in the United Arab Emirates but those issues have multiplied now. Nineteen points behind Rangers when they left, the gap is now 21, but that's only one of the things that have turned Celtic into a soap opera.

The fallout from their trip to Dubai has seen the Scottish government, the Scottish FA and the SPFL all criticised for not taking a strong enough lead. It's true that the SPFL facilitated the trip. It's also true that when issuing a statement on Monday about the pausing of the lower leagues, the SPFL had nothing to say about the Celtic farrago. Their champion club sparking chaos in the domestic game and incurring the wrath of other teams and not a peep from the governing body of the league. Not a word of criticism, not a suggestion of an investigation. The lack of leadership would be remarkable if it wasn't so predictable.

An attitude of entitlement

This decision was Celtic's, though. They own it and all the consequences. They travelled to Dubai when they had no need to. They put their own people at risk by flying 3,500 miles in a pandemic. They now have one positive Covid-19 test for Christopher Jullien and 16 people self-isolating.

They're getting pelted with flak for their own recklessness while being laughed out of town for the abject situation they've plunged themselves into. Over the years the executive at Celtic have spoken often about how unique they are as a club, how they are an example to others in this country. They see themselves as a European club with attitudes to match. None of their recent travails in the Champions League and Europa League have changed their view of themselves.

Their statement

on Monday suggested they still can't see, or don't want to see, the problem with the trip to Dubai. There was no acceptance that they did anything wrong, no contrition, no nod to the anger of a great number of their own supporters who are paying hundreds of pounds to watch television pictures of a team in decline, who are locking down and whose working lives and personal circumstances might be hugely affected by the world we're living in right now.

The snapshot of Lennon and Scott Brown with beers by the pool was a nightmare of perception. The admission by John Kennedy, Lennon's assistant, that in terms of following Covid-19 protocols Celtic had slipped up on "minor things" betrayed an attitude of arrogance and entitlement. As if "minor things" don't matter in a pandemic.

There was no apology for these slip-ups, not from Kennedy or in the official club statement that was paragraph after paragraph of self-justification. Celtic spoke about their "rigorous protocols" without addressing Kennedy's mention of breaches. Yes, they said, Jullien has tested positive and 13 players plus Lennon, Kennedy and one other staff member are self-isolating, but this could just as easily have happened in Glasgow as Dubai.

It was a risible defence. The reason so many are self-isolating is because plane and team bus manifests identified them as close contacts of Jullien. If there was no trip to Dubai there'd have been no plane, no need of a team bus. By travelling they put themselves in danger. They did it. Nobody else. Judging by their statement, Celtic would appear to be tone deaf to all of this.

Lower leagues 'martyrs' for Celtic failings?

The lower leagues have now been suspended. The SFA say the decision was not a response to Celtic's failings, that it was going to happen anyway. How many clubs affected by the three-week shutdown will buy that? Iain McMenemy, chairman of Stenhousemuir, said: "It feels like the Scottish FA has come under pressure from the Scottish government to take action following the much-maligned trip by Celtic to Dubai, and their response has been to offer up lower league clubs as martyrs instead."

Whether he's right or wrong, McMenemy won't be alone in that view. What is indisputable is that Celtic have badly lost their way. This is a club that had a firm reputation for making good decisions on and off the pitch during the nine-in-a-row years. It's now a club that doesn't just have a problem reading the flight of a football into their own box, but also has an issue in reading a room. It's not difficult, or shouldn't be.

Right now, everything is a struggle for them. Even the simplest things. Their slide into chaos has been remarkable.

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19 minutes ago, five stars said:

Surprising to see the media turning on them, especially The Guardian, which gave up on objective journalism long ago.

Hurting mate .They have to aim at someone .Still not much aimed at the Spfl and that’s where the real corruption lies 

 

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46 minutes ago, GetToTheChoppa said:

"celtic draw with Hibs despite 13 players isolating after positive Covid-19 test"

Media trying to make it look like it was a good result. Terrible result and terrible performance.

This line should have been "celtic draw with hibs despite 8 players from the old firm match playing despite 13 isolating.

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2 minutes ago, eejay the dj said:

Hurting mate .They have to aim at someone .Still not much aimed at the Spfl and that’s where the real corruption lies 

 

The football authorities must of pissed off many clubs with their blatant bias over the last few years. St Mirren, Partick, Hearts and maybe the majority of the lower league clubs for a start.

Our attempt at regime change in the summer failed, maybe it's time to try again.

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1 hour ago, Smile said:

punters lapped up thrashings of Hamilton Accies

Sums up the tainted 8.75 iar.
Will include cunts like andy walker who kept quiet while they were winning.

You aint fuckin laughing now.

'Nero fiddled while Rome burned'...... will be on a cairn to be placed on the derelict site. :UK:

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here is total silence from Doncaster, his chairman Murdoch MacLennan and non-executive directors implicated in yet another farce. This is, however, predictable.

Hide and keep the heid down , this will go away.

Rangers warned Scottish football about these clowns and this is what happens when tims run the show. 

Whats the point of stopping lower league football ? Nobody goes to see it anyway.

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