state of the club address
november 2009

This year’s follow-up state of the club address is brought to you once again by the right honourable James Payne.

Towards the end of last year I submitted an article to this magazine in which I gave my longwinded opinions as to how I felt Celtic was getting on at that time- we’d just been knocked out of European competition but were comfortably ahead in the league so on the field it was disappointing but far from disastrous.

It was an overlong article- and rereading my submission I see that JB Banal did a fine job of editing it down to a length which wouldn’t have any readers losing the will to live as they reached even half way through it.

The main theme of my article was that Celtic was at a crossroads in its history. A crossroads where it had to choose thinking long-term and not to remain focussed purely on the antics of our greatest local rivals.

I think it is fair to see that if my clichéd analogy had any relevance then Celtic took that feared wrong turning not long after I wrote the article but before it saw the light of day towards the end of January 2008.

On the twenty seventh of December 2008 a superb Scott Macdonald goal saw Rangers deservedly beaten at Ibrox to put us seven points ahead in the SPL. During the ’transfer window’ that followed on from that apparently league deciding victory Celtic contrived to drop points at home to Dundee United having been two goals to the good and then lost by four goals to two to an Aberdeen side that launched no more than half a dozen meaningful attacks on the Celtic goal during the entire match.

The only signings made in that ‘window’ were players few felt would be likely to play a significant a role in the final months of the season. In the event, three players - Willo Flood, Milan Misun and Niall McGinn - between them came for a total outlay that barely made it into six figures and, as it turned out, only the first named appeared in the first team at all - making a grand total of two starts.

Perhaps of more significance was who didn’t join us.

During January of this year our then manager, Gordon Strachan, launched an ultimately failed bid to sign Hibernian’s Stephen Fletcher. Given Celtic’s now well established dislike for discussing unsuccessful transfer bids we have to rely on press speculation and the grapevine to work out what happened. The common consensus given by these, admittedly unreliable, sources is that Celtic baulked at raising their bid by half a million pounds to match Hibs’ valuation. The player had seemed keen to come to Celtic- there were as I recall quotes from the player himself so this is not just hearsay - but he didn’t join us.

Celtic was already showing dangerous signs of drying up in front of goal even before my article of last season, but after Fletcher was not signed only Scott MacDonald scored more than a handful of goals and even he dried up eventually. Georgios Samaras only managed one or two more in the closing four months while Big Jan got four in that same period. Naka got a few - mainly in a one sided match versus St Mirren it must be added - and our central defenders chipped in with a few, but other than a brilliant strike by Crosas in that aforementioned mismatch against the Buddies and Aiden McGeady’s penalty against Rangers in the CIS Cup Final our midfield misfired absolutely near goal.

We lost the league after we drew blanks in both of our last two matches. Would Fletcher have made the difference? Maybes aye, maybes naw, as the fellow said, but what was inescapable was the realisation that in January 2009 the Celtic board - led by Chief Executive Peter Lawell and Chairman John Reid with Dermot Desmond playing his now customary role of absentee landlord - believed that we had the measure of our nearest challengers and that no further expenditure was required.

I think the word ‘hubris’ is the right one to describe how our board acted.

Whatever the correct word to describe what they did in behaving as they did, in my opinion they took Celtic in the wrong direction. Fiscal conservatism and staying just ahead of our impoverished rivals was deemed more important than tying up the league and introducing a promising player into a winning team.

I am not so sure Fletcher would have proved to be such a great long term buy, but I am certain that if he’d signed we’d have won the league last season - by about twenty points at that.

Just think of all those games where we couldn‘t finish off mediocre teams and the difference a big, strong, eager, striker would have made instead of the dismally out of touch JVoH or less than effervescent Sammy (Is there any other kind of Sammy than the less than effervescent one?).

Face it folks, we got what we deserved for our club‘s overconfidence and lack of real forward thinking. We failed. And continue to do so.

Those who read my article last year will of course say that I had not advocated lavish spending given the state of the economy at that time.

Well I don‘t think four million for a striker who would have almost certainly ensured qualification for the Champions League without the necessity of any preliminary round matches would have been lavish at all.

My belief remains that the time for Celtic to have really ‘splashed-the-cash’ was in either of the summer of 2003 (post-Seville) or in the January 2007 transfer window prior to our 2nd round Champions League tie with AC Milan- times when we had a demonstrably better chance of getting to the heights we all thought we were capable of scaling than we had during 2008/9 season.

But, really, four million pounds - less than we paid for Scott Brown in July 2007- should not be beyond the budget of a company whose turnover was, according to its recently published annual report, £72.5m.

Ask any Celtic fan to name their worst football experience of the twenty first century, chances are they would, to a man or woman, say the events of Black Sunday when we lost the league in the dying minutes of our last league game. But the way things are going now I think that the events of last season will eventually come to be seen as being more genuinely calamitous.

During the second half of 2005 Celtic made some pretence at acting like a big club and, in the process, got ride of sentimental favourites and replaced them with great signings in Nakamura and Boruc while Zurawski and Roy Keane were hardly failures, even if the Polish striker faded in his second season whilst the Irish legend‘s stay was all too brief.

WGS wasn’t to everybody’s taste, it’s true, but he took us further in the Champions League than his saintly - and rather more obviously affable - predecessor.

Yet look at us now five months on from the surrender of our league flag. The obvious comparison point would seem to be that post-Black Sunday period, but, on the field at least things are beginning to resemble the dark days of 1993.

Gordon Strachan left after our final league match of the 2008-09 season and most of us felt he had made the right decision. Never as unpopular with the support as the local hacks would have us believe, most of us thought that he’d done a pretty good job in his time but also that he’d gone as far as he was going to take us. His team looked stale and there was a feeling that he’d been far too loyal to certain players who were in the midst of protracted form slumps - most obviously Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink and club captain Stephen McManus - while his hunches when it came to team selection - dropping Nakamura for Flood at Tynecastle in April and picking Maloney ahead of McGeady at Ibrox a month later to give just two examples - just didn’t work. A new broom was required.

What was desperately needed was a new manager with really new ideas and, in my opinion, preferably one with no baggage when it came to Celtic. A foreign coach - one who operated like Wim Jansen or, after he got settled, the undervalued Jo Venglos- seemed ideal .

What we got was an appointment which smacked of conservatism and which was dismally unimaginative.

Tony Mowbray had played for Celtic in the dark days of Liam Brady and Lou Macari and he’d been a popular figure. A solid enough centre half, his wholeheartedness on the field and dignity in the face of ghastly personal tragedy endeared him to the support.

I have to confess that I largely lost of sight of him in the years that followed his return south in 1995 and it was a surprise when Hibernian appointed him manager in 2004 to replace Bobby Williamson. There was little in the five seasons which followed that Easter Road appointment that marked him out as the kind of man who was good enough to manage Celtic.

It was true that his Hibs side won a lot of praise for their stylish play in his time in Edinburgh but his team didn’t win anything and my chief memories of his time were of his team not trying to equalise against Rangers during the last twenty minutes of the match played on Black Sunday and of their capitulation by four goals to nil against a Hearts side in the semi-final of the Scottish Cup of 2006.

It was true that his West Brom side got promoted in 2008 but their return to the Premiership was brief and they never looked like staying up totally failing to give their supporters much of a run for their money. The Baggies’ style of play earned some plaudits on their return to the Premiership but listening to match reports on the way home from Celtic games or work such praise became increasingly rare. Albion eventually went down with a quiet whimper.

Bizarrely, the Celtic board, a board now widely regarded as being as parsimonious with money as their predecessors of twenty years before, decided to lash out the best part of three million pounds to bring Mowbray to Celtic. A manager who’d never won anything and whose sides had a track record of losing when it mattered was chosen at great expense because, it seemed, his sides had a reputation of playing nice football and because, unlike WGS, he‘d been a Celtic player.

It was true that Strachan’s side had become as exciting to watch as listening to, far less watching, the grass grow but to get somebody in whose only valid selling point was that he had managed a Hibs team that had outpassed Celtic a few times - usually with Celtic still winning- seemed illogical.

Nevertheless there were fans who stated that they’d rather watch an attractive team that one which won things. I know which I prefer ( if I can’t have both) and I have no desire to return to the way things were under Liam Brady or even Tommy Burns (who did of course win a trophy) and I suspect that few other people seriously do. I suppose, though, I thought Mowbray’s new Celtic would be better to watch than the turgid fare of last season.

But after a bright showing in some of the pre-season games, a surprise win in Moscow and a decent first half at Pittodrie, the quality of play has been no more entertaining than last season‘s.

The five-two win over St Johnstone was nowhere near as good as you’d imagine a game in which seven goals were scored and since then, aside from a couple of great goals by Paddy McCourt and flashes of brilliance from McGeady it’s been dull, dull, dull.

And not only has it been dull it’s been a shambles. The defeat in Tel Aviv to a Happoel side which would be lucky to make it into the top half of the SPL was a far worse footballing performance than the catastrophe of Aalborg. In Denmark we might have lost but until the Danes scored we had at least looked, comfortably, the better team. In Israel we played atrociously throughout and were quite deservedly beaten, with every area of the team misfiring.

Things have rarely got any better since that dire evening.

Under both Martin O’Neill and Gordon Strachan Celtic were often criticised for being one dimensional, predictable, lacking in anything resembling a Plan B.

In November 2009 we are still one dimensional and predictable but now increasingly look as though we have no Plan A. The team takes the field , lets an early goal in, attacks with all the sophistication of a Daily Mail editorial, plays boring, inconsequential football and then fades.

Under Strachan one thing you couldn’t criticise was the team’s fitness but this season we look physically unimpressive and as deficient in stamina as we are finesse.

The attack - bolstered for a while by the less than prolific new signing Fortune and the returning Chris Killen - looks no more potent than it did in those two rotten games that ended last season, the central midfield is weak and looks, incredibly, less creative for the loss of Massimo Donati while the defence hasn’t looked as leaky since Mowbray himself played in it.

That the three main areas of the team are not performing won’t come as a surprise to those who watched largely the same group of players in the second half of Gordon Strachan’s reign as there were clear signs of decline in those two seasons.

What is surprising, though, is the rate of decline under the new manager and in particular the degenrating form of a couple of players in particular.

The performances of both Gary Caldwell and Scot Brown last season was rather overrated - neither passes the ball well while Caldwell has always been guilty of carelessness and Brown’s considerable energy never achieved as much as it should have - but they were still pretty effective players and it was reasonable to hope that under a man who had led them reasonably successfully before that their generally good form would be at least maintained.

Instead they are probably Celtic’s least effective regular starters. An explanation for Brown seems to be that he has been rushed back into the team without being fully fit while both seem to have lost confidence.

This loss of confidence seems to be running through the team and, even more so than in the Strachan era, the players seem to be uncomfortable when they step on the pitch.

There also seems to be a lack of the traditional fire in the play, especially at the start of games, never more so than at the start of the match at Celtic Park with Rapid Vienna when, in a match which meant so much to the supporters (who’d paid full whack for the privilege) Celtic played with no enthusiasm from the first whistle until gifted an equaliser by another second rate team. (On the subject of the Europa League if the manager believes it to be less important than a league match then we should not be asked to pay, as I was, twenty eight pounds to watch it)

I appreciate that I might be coming across as unduly critical of our new manager, but so far I do think it’s hard too see many signs of progress under his leadership. Having said that, it’s worth pointing out that while none of his four signings to date looks a master stroke in the mould of Willie Wallace/Henrik Larsson/Artur Boruc neither do any of them look to be a Cascarino/Raphael/Gravsen class stinker so I’m prepared to wait to deliver my verdict on that aspect of Mowbray’s tenure in a year’s time.

It is obvious, though, that the team isn’t playing any more attractively than it was under Gordon Strachan or latter period MON and in addition it looks more vulnerable at Celtic Park than at any time since Lou Macari was manager.

Watching Celtic’s flaccid performances against Arsenal and Rapid Vienna it was hard to imagine that in the last three years we’ve beaten Benfica, Manchester United, AC Milan and Villarreal in the Champions’ League.

But other Celtic managers have made unimpressive starts to their time in charge and gone on to success. Billy MacNeill’s first season in 78/9 yielded only 7 league wins before Christmas and he turned it round. Gordon Strachan’s first season was greatly helped by the implosion of league leaders Hearts from late October onwards. And of course John Barnes had the best start to any season since the early days of Jock Stein and he was a complete dud.

This season we’ve lost at Ibrox in more controversial circumstances than you’d have thought from the reaction in the media and I doubt any Celtic fan left Ibrox or turned off the television after the game thinking the league was lost.

Frankly, it would not be a major surprise to me that if and when the new manager is able to instil in the players his own philosophy and gets them to play in away that is not just an even weaker, duller version of last season’s approach that Celtic will flourish domestically. I am not impressed with Mogga so far and I wasn’t actually that delighted he was appointed in the first place but mid autumn of his first season probably is a bit early to write him off and, importantly, he‘s the kind of decent, thoughtful man people like to see succeeding.

There are other areas of the club in which a verdict can at least be considered, alas.

Last year I was still prepared to concede the possibility that the current board were not steering the club in the wrong direction but now their performance increasingly looks to have failed the club and its supporters on more than just a short term basis.

The club might not be in the kind of financial straits it found itself in during the early part of 1994 but the policies pursued by the club since late in 2001 are the major contributory factor in my feeling that Celtic’s progress hasn’t just stalled but been put into reverse.

The board - led by main shareholder Dermot Desmond - were almost certainly right to seek to reduce the club’s debts in the closing weeks of 2001 when the chill wind of recession blew through the football world following the collapse of the ITV Digital networks around that time. 2001/2 was also the last season of the SPL’s then current deal with Sky Television and it was clear that neither Sky nor any other broadcaster was going to come up with a significantly improved deal for Scottish football. In an attempt to bolster income from television there was even talk of the SPL setting up its own channel from scratch.

A new realism crept in at Celtic Park and the chequebook was quietly locked away.

The new fiscal realism stayed until it seemed to become the raison d’etre of the Celtic board, even the club itself, although the club’s debts were at that time a fraction of those borne at that time by clubs such as Fiorentina, Leeds United and, er, Rangers. They were high but they did seem to be sustainable and were not, to use an expression beloved of media economists ’ eye watering’.

And remember, the money borrowed brought Chris Sutton, Alan Thompson, Neil Lennon, John Hartson as well as Martin O’Neill and his managerial team to Celtic- and they took us to three titles in four seasons, the Champions League Group Stages (unthinkable in 1994), a UEFA Cup Final and unforgettable victories over Ajax, Juventus, Liverpool, Lyon and Barcelona.

But by the time of the last two of these triumphs Celtic had already well and truly slammed the brakes on signing players. During 2003/4 we only made one permanent signing - Stephen Pearson from Motherwell for £300,000. Rumour had it that even that money would not have been released to MON if Celtic hadn’t received a like sum from the SFA as compensation for an injury sustained by Paul Lambert whilst our captain was playing for Scotland against Germany.

The money Celtic got during that season from television was not great and certainly less than during the years of the Sky deal but we never really got that much from Sky either so I‘ve always felt that argument was a bit disingenuous.

The fact is that despite a growth in income during the second half of the decade, investment in the team has fallen to pre- Fergus McCann levels.

Of course the debt figure has fallen and considering a new training facility was built in that time that is an oddly impressive feat.

More relevantly though Celtic’s standing in the wider European picture has collapsed in the last eighteen months at an even more rapid rate than the debt figure.

The reality of commerce is that most businesses operate with some level of bank debt - using their overdraft as working capital - but Celtic seems to have abandoned this idea. In keeping spending to the bare minimum required to maintain the levels of domestic success, these supposed sober, astute businessmen were actually taking a huge gamble.

The gamble was that Rangers, mired in far less comfortable, hell, eye-watering debt, would continue to decline on the field and that we would win our league and, if not automatically qualified for the Champions’ League, certainly have a much easier route into the group stage than the one we found ourselves with in the summer of 2009.

Celtic’s failure to qualify for the Champions’ League was a direct result of the board’s astuteness/stinginess (delete according to taste).

To restore Celtic to the level of where we were in 2006 - far less 2003 - can be brought about only by spending more money on players than has been the case since 2001. Therefore the debt figure must rise.

The City remains unimpressed despite this miraculous management of debt; the share price has been stuck in the low forties for month after month. So they have failed on their own terms as well.

Don’t expect any acknowledgement of such failure however. The club’s hierarchy still seems in a self-congratulatory mood while the re-designation of ourselves as underdogs - a process in full swing a year ago when we went to Manchester adopting the same timid approach that Hamilton Accies bring to Celtic Park - continues unabated.

Some of the utterances coming from Peter Lawell in particular seem to suggest that the club has now readjusted its aspirations downwards yet again. A year ago we were told the summit of our ambitions was a quarter-final place in the Champions’ League and now our level seems to be the Europa League (likely sponsor M. Mouse).

I am not stupid enough to think that we have had a realistic chance of winning the premier tournament but the club openly lowering targets woulkd almost seem to guarantee mediocrity.

And then of course we have the revival of talk of us leaving the SPL to play in the Premiership or some other league which has not yet been created. We have been fed versions of this for at least forty years - I recall the late Prince Rainier of Monaco was forever trying to get the idea of a Pan-European league off the ground with UEFA - and while I think it would be better if we played in the EPL or a league in which Juve, Barca, Liverpool etc are amongst our regular opponents and while the latest rumours about our leaving the SPL haven’t been dismissed as swiftly south-of the Border as is often the case, I really cannot see it happening.

And as for Peter Lawell’s recent jive about us being willing to go into the English League in the bottom league - given England’s structure does that mean League 2, the Conference or one of the regional conferences Peter? - well our chief executive might be happy at the idea of a guarantee of playing against trashy teams for three years without the possibility of the autumnal diversion of matches with good European teams but I am not.

It might be expensive enough to go and watch Celtic playing at Rugby Park, McDiarmid Park and Tannadice but at least they are reasonably convenient to get to for the overwhelming majority of our supporters. You can’t say the same about Yeovil, Plymouth or Norwich. Green Army! as the fellow said.

I don’t wish to end this already over-long and overly gloomy article on a low note but I can’t see it finishing on a high one either.

To those of us who already doubt Tony Mowbray I would suggest that we give the guy a chance at least.

To the board I’d simply ask that they take a long hard look at where they’ve led us and when they do look realise that staying just ahead of a really crappy Rangers’ team as being the most we can aim for should not be what our club is about. They should also accept that the EPL is unlikely to want us for the foreseeable future and if the day comes when they do it’s probably because it’s no longer as attractive as it was when they wouldn‘t let us near it.

The situation is not hopeless or irreversible in the way that it seemed to be twenty years ago. But if we continue to carry on as we are then it might just become so.

Paul Whitehouse is 53.