into the abyss?

 

Jim Payne reflects on mistakes of the past and ponders an uncertain future for the club

abyss [? bíss]

(plural abysses)

n

1. chasm: a chasm or gorge so deep or vast that its extent is not visible

2. endless space: something that is immeasurably deep or infinite

3. terrible situation: a situation of apparently unending awfulness

4. hell: hell thought of as a bottomless pit

Just over twenty years ago my friend Tony Reynolds and I sat in my mother’s kitchen and composed a letter which we sent to the Glasgow Herald. The letter was in response to a bizarre appearance on Scotsport by Celtic’s then chairman John C. McGinn in which the founder of the Celtic View had, amongst other things, spoken of ‘novel ways’ in which the club would raise money to finance the construction of a new stadium as well as strengthen a team which at that stage was, though we didn’t know it, to win only one more league game that particular season.

I probably wrote most of the letter and I was as verbose then as I am now but Tony came up with the key phrase which summed up how we felt. Celtic was, in January 1990, on the ‘edge of an abyss of mediocrity’.

The letter was published and yours truly was phoned by James Traynor who, I think, thought we were onto (or possibly just on) something. The week after it was published the Celtic fans sang ’sack the board’ for the first time.

History shows that whilst we did indeed enter a very deep pit not long after those events of twenty years ago it also shows that after four years we began our ascent from Hell.

We nearly slipped back into it a few times over the next six years finally emerging into the bright sunshine on the 27th of August 2000 when Martin O’Neill’s team beat Rangers 6-2.

In April 2010 we once again find ourselves on the edge of the precipice. A headlong descent is avoidable but on recent evidence such an escape from the abyss does not seem that likely.

Saturday the tenth of April 2010 was not a happy day for Celtic. Even by the standards of the occasionally numbingly embarrassments which began on 27th August 1988 when Ian Andrews let in five at Ibrox through the League Cup Final of 1994/5, Supercaley going ballistic, Black Sunday, Roy Keane’s debut and losing four-nil to St Mirren the loss to Ross County was a nadir when it comes to numbing embarrassment.

This is not really the place to dwell on the specifics on who was to blame for the shameful debacle but the game is a good place to contemplate Celtic’s future.

Historically it is easy to take comfort from the parallels between the three-one home defeat to Inverness Caley Thistle in 2000 and, more recently, the semi-final defeat.

That earlier humiliation was a turning point in Celtic’s fortunes - without that loss we’d have had no Martin O’Neill, no 6 leagues in eight seasons, no Seville, no epic victories over the likes of Juventus, Liverpool, Lyon, Benfica, Manchester United, Barcelona and Milan.

The Ross County defeat may well have been as unpalatable and may well prove as fatal to Neil Lennon’s career as Celtic boss as the Caley loss proved to John Barnes’ holding of the same post, but there, I think, the similarities begin to fade.

Sticking to the comparisons between the two games for just a little bit longer, the main difference is that in 2000 Celtic’s obvious status as hot favourites to beat Steve Paterson’s side bred complacency in the ranks of the support as well as the team even though there was, not far beneath the surface, real fear that Barnes’ team was headed for some sort of disaster later in the season.

Ten years on, the defeat at St Mirren which was to lead to the sacking of Tony Mowbray should have been the low point of not just this season but an era.

Unlike Caley, County had already shown real form against SPL opposition prior to the meeting with Celtic. But Neil Lennon had shown enough in previous matches to indicate that his team would be in the right frame of mind to accomplish the task of beating lower league opposition - a club with fewer resources than clubs in England’s fifth tier, the Conference, let us not forget. But Lennon’s team did not rise to the task and lost disgracefully.

Celtic lost to ICT because we complacently underestimated a team playing miles better than anyone thought it capable of playing. We lost to Ross County because they played well and we played woefully.

In 2000 we played badly because we had a clown for a manager. In 2010 we lost because we have a bad team. Period.

In 2000 Celtic was stumbling. The so called Dream Team of Dalglish and Barnes was a costly failure but the club itself was reasonably buoyant and there was the legitimate belief that when our star player returned from injury we’d do well again.

It’s true that in 2010 we have a few players out but - Artur Boruc aside - who actually would you have had in the team instead of those who flopped so miserably if everyone had been fit?

Leaving aside the slightly odd treatment of Rasmussen there is nobody other than Rogne I can think of I’d have had in instead of those who failed.

In the spring of 2000 exciting names such as Guus Hiddink, Co Adriaanese and Martin O’Neill were talked of as candidates for the job. People believed that the club would land such a man.

Ten years later some exciting names like Mark Hughes, Avram Grant and Eric Gerets are mentioned but few amongst the support believe they’ll come.

In 2000 Celtic’s board was capable of making amazing blunders and taking foolhardy risks. So is the 2010 version.

In 2000 Celtic’s board though still had ambitions to take the club to the top. I don’t think that you can think the same of the current board.

Since 2002 there has been a systematic downsizing in Celtic’s ambitions that has negated all the progress made between 1994 and 2002.

It is, of course, very easy to blame the current board for Celtic’s failings in the spring of 2010. They compare badly with the board of 2000. The earlier board screwed up big style. Two words. John Barnes. As they say ‘End of’.

2010? The board we have now failed totally to build on the success that took us to Seville.

Remember Seville? Standing in a stadium in a foreign land watching our team in a European final, singing our hearts out watching Henrik, Lenny, Lambo, Sutty and the rest giving some meaning, in a football context at least, to the expression ‘ Heroic Failure’.

As I’ve said before in previous articles Seville was a key moment to illustrate the way the Board now went about its business. By early 2007 we had a board that went into the matches with AC Milan in the knockout phase of the Champions’ League with a smaller squad than that which had beaten Manchester United in November 2006.

I watched that last named game in Paddy Maguire’s Bar in Sydney, Australia and realised Celtic was a bigger club than even I’d thought but the board obviously didn‘t.

Things got worse . The board decided that meaningful strengthening of the Celtic squad in January 2009 was less important than presenting an impressive set of recession-confounding figures to the City.

And of course this is the board which appointed Tony Mowbray to be Celtic’s manager. Evidence for the prosecution? Mowbray’s tenure as Celtic’s manager. Surely?

Of course it was the current board which chose to employ a man with a modest CV at a time when Celtic, on the field, looked to be in urgent need of improvement. And Mowbray was terrible. Possibly even worse than Barnes or Brady.

But whilst there was little real enthusiasm amongst the support when he was appointed few, if any, thought he’d be as bad as he turned out. Had I been asked how I thought we’d do at the start of the season I’d have thought we’d probably have had a similar season to that enjoyed by Rangers - dominant at home but outclassed abroad.

I was half right.

Mowbray looked like a dull, timid appointment not a disastrous one. The problem is that in the current circumstances and given the board’s recent record a dull, timid appointment seems the most likely option this time around.

I believe we are on the edge of the abyss all right. I believe the board with its pusillanimous approach to financing the team, its failure to communicate effectively with the support (especially in the weeks after Mowbray was sacked), its woeful lack of ambition since the early part of this century and its obsession with the bottom line have played their part in dragging us so close that we can see down into the pit.

But circumstances we’ve had no control over have played their part just as surely. We play in a small country and if an alien asked you what the expression ’big fish in a small pond’ means beyond the purely literal we are the perfect example.

Not only do we play in a small country our football is laughably bad even in comparison with a generation ago. We used to see ourselves as being on a par with the leagues of Portugal or Holland - we were a small country which punched above its weight. Now standards in Scotland are realistically on a par with the leagues in Ireland. As a club we have tried- maybe not as hard as we would have liked but tried all the same- to swim against the tide of dross. But even if we had tried harder we might well have been dragged to the edge anyway.

I don’t want to seem too pessimistic but I think it will take a medium sized miracle to prevent us avoiding the abyss.

A decent managerial appointment may pull us away from the edge and Rangers’ continuing financial woe means that overtaking them ( or at least not falling into the abyss as far or as quickly as they do) is not unrealistic. But to get to where we want to be - playing in European competition after Christmas, being a club that even big guns from England, Spain and Italy aren’t confident of beating, whilst playing winning, thrilling football at home while we rack up trophy after trophy - seems a long way away.

The Abyss beckons once more. Through our own ineptitude as well as circumstances beyond our control we may be unable to prevent our falling into it.

JIM PAYNE