looking for the corner to turn

 

Tony Mowbray might have Lazarus sitting beside him, but it’s going to take a comeback worthy of his biblical namesake if he manages to turn around the situation he presently finds himself in at Celtic Park. When the debate has already started about ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ your days are probably numbered.

No doubt he has been the victim of an almost unprecedented amount of poor decisions by officials which have cost us dear in terms of points (a fact acknowledged by Hugh Dallas last week in his usual oblique fashion), but ultimately Mowbray’s future will be decided on the new players he has brought to the club and the results they deliver for him. If the Kilmarnock and Aberdeen debacles are anything to go by then it’s not looking good.

No need to catalogue right now the bewildering story of the season. 14 wins out of 25 league games this season tells its own story. The grim fact is that unless Celtic go on this mythical prolonged unbeaten run and turn the corner we are still groping to find, we will soon be looking over our shoulder to see who might be overtaking us for second place. Unthinkable that the present Celtic manager could emulate Alex McLeish’s singular achievement during his reign at the Death Star in managing to come third in a two horse race.
So far, despite the optimism that goes with the territory of being a Celtic supporter, there is nothing to suggest that Tony Mowbray can inspire his players to win eleven games on the spin in a season where we haven’t managed three league wins put together.

The question facing the board then, is do they twist or stick at the beginning of March. Should they decide to stick with Project Mowbray for another season they could be looking at another drastic fall in sales of season tickets as a support which cannot fathom why we are unable to translate our position of fiscal strength off the field into a coherent and entertaining football side on it, decide that they can no longer bankroll a strategy that is becoming increasingly difficult to fathom out.

If they decide to twist then they will have to make sure that this time round they appoint a course and distance winner as well as someone who can make an immediate difference to the team and salvage something from this car crash of a season. The appointment of BTM was merely symptomatic of the inability at boardroom level to impact on the football operation rather than the bank balance. If Mowbray does go, there should be some searching questions of the men above him that have allowed this state of affairs to fester for so long.

The perception right now is that the club at the top level has been taking no meaningful steps to address the challenges facing us. The direction appears to have been set in stone for the past three years and the fans are now under the impression that the balance sheet and the business plan have taken precedence over the midfield and the defence.

Which is why it was equally bewildering, in the midst of Robbie Keane fever, to have confirmed the worst kept secret of the year when the club announced its new sponsorship deal to replace seven years of Carling on the front of the Hoops. You would think, wouldn’t you, that a business that relies heavily on the good will of its customer base would actually listen to them? Whatever happened to the days of Iain MacLeod and his focus groups?

Not too difficult, is it, to imagine the answer to a simple question like, “Would you like to see Celtic enter into a joint sponsorship deal with Rangers at a time when the fans are doing their utmost to put as much distance as possible between us and them, even to the point of rendering the term ‘Old Firm’ redundant?”

The end of the Carling arrangement offered us some hope that this was an opportunity to prove that we can operate independently and prove that Celtic is, as we are led to believe, a global brand and an attractive prospect for potential international sponsors; a chance to break another subliminal link to our lame duck, debt-ridden, morally and financially bankrupt city rivals.

Instead the board have come up with a solution that looks lazy, parochial and indicative of a lack of imagination, hooking us up with a product associated with west of Scotland drinking culture, not to mention the thought of how their company logo will look on the front of the Celtic jersey. If the Carling design had all the aesthetic allure of a blob of tar, the thought of a giant red T is the stuff of dayglo nightmares. There can’t be too many fans out there who wouldn’t gladly forego the £1 million a year simply to avoid such a monstrosity!

If the board are trying to prove that they are more on the ball than their Kinning Park counterparts then they’ve got a funny way of showing it.

There is no getting out of it now and we’re lumbered with it for the next three years, but as a support we need to whatever we can to ensure that such a deal never happens again. What the board might find is that the club may lose more sales of strips by agreeing to this deal as there are a lot of fans who won’t buy any Tennents branded merchandise. The green pound might be a more fickle commodity than the suits give us credit for.

“No more Old Firm”, in whatever form it exists.

MARMADUKE BAGLEHOLE