Win at Tynecastle in the biggest game of the campaign so far this afternoon and their players and management — and, no doubt, a sizeable percentage of the fans — will disagree, but the blunt truth is that Celtic deserve absolutely nothing from this season.
And a season with nothing at the end of it is maybe what it requires for the club to really get the finger out and concentrate on becoming a football institution to reckon with again rather than just a business good at making money and even better at hoarding it in the bank.
Being honest, anything could happen down Gorgie way today. Both sides have a been pretty hit-and-miss of late. Both could really do with a statement victory, as these things always seem to be labelled these days, to assuage concerns that their respective seasons are carrying ominous portents at the moment.
At Hearts, manager Derek McInnes has some killer injuries to deal with in the shape of Cammy Devlin and Lawrence Shankland, You could argue they are the two most consistently influential players in the line-up — even if they don’t quite produce the same electricity as a Claudio Braga or an Alexandros Kyziridis, two guys who are really going to have to step up to the plate this afternoon to keep the maroon machine rolling.
Given recent form and the fact a number of other players are either out or lacking fitness, you might argue that a draw might not be the worst possible outcome for the Jam Tarts.
Yet, Celtic are no great shakes. Even with 73-year-old Martin O’Neill back at the helm for the second time in a matter of months — a fact, alone, which sums up how ridiculous things have become there — you never really know what you’re going to get from them.
Celtic have too often underperformed in what has been a season to forget for the Glasgow club
Martin O’Neill has come in for his third spell as manager following the failure of Wilfried Nancy
Chief executive Michael Nicholson is failing to be ‘world class’ in everything that he does
Eighteen months after flogging Kyogo Furuhashi to Rennes, there still isn’t a proper replacement at centre-forward in the building. Tomas Cvancara has just arrived on a loan deal from Borussia Moenchengladbach, but he comes with very mixed reports about how he’s been doing since leaving Sparta Prague two-and-a-half years ago and has O’Neill at pains to point out he shouldn’t be looked upon as a target man.
By all accounts, Cvancara operates better as a second striker or even wide right. His new boss certainly doesn’t want people to regard him as the answer for everything, which, even though it might be no more than a ploy to keep the pressure off, doesn’t exactly breed confidence.
That it’s an out-and-out centre-forward the club is crying out for, of course, is as clear as clear can be. And has been for a long time.
That’s the thing, though. Cashing in on a great deal for Kyogo and not spending a substantial amount on a replacement is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the defending champions.
From the unnamed sources taking aim at Brendan Rodgers before his bitter and explosive departure — largely over a lack of meaningful transfers — to Wilfried Nancy being left to hang himself out to dry, everything Celtic could have got wrong, they have got wrong.
They are embroiled in civil war with their own supporters to the degree that they cannot even see a club AGM through to the finishing line and have just got shot of head of football operations Paul Tisdale, having never made it entirely clear what he was brought in to do — or which part of his CV made him even a contender for that role.
New Celtic loan signing Cvancara has already seen expectations of his impact played down
God knows what kind of recruitment set-up O’Neill and his assistant Shaun Maloney have been left to work with as they endeavour to get things back on the straight and narrow, but it sounds like they’ve been left to get on the phone and see what they can come up with — which is quite insane for a club that CEO Michael Nicholson regularly claims wants to be world-class in everything it does.
Celtic bought badly for this season. They didn’t invest enough in the squad despite having the best part of £80m in the bank. They didn’t take care of problems in-house with Rodgers until it was too late.
The team has had to depend on the likes of Daizen Maeda and Yang Hyun-jun, who had moves lined up last summer and ended up having the carpet whisked away from them because of failings higher up the chain from those who hired a dud in Nancy and just left him out there to die alone in the heat.
Captain Callum McGregor emerged from a spell in hibernation — or, to be more accurate, a spell of staying largely away from the media — at the end of last week to state that the Frenchman just tried to change ‘too much too soon’.
Going hell for leather with a 3-4-3 system that wasn’t working — and then refusing to step back and regroup — cooked Nancy’s goose along with all the psychobabble about performances meaning more than results.
Derek McInnes is in charge of a Hearts outfit that looks to be properly run from top to bottom
However, those players ought to have a look at themselves too. Some looked like they’d downed tools under Nancy. Most gave the impression they weren’t listening to him. Whatever the reality, they have to take responsibility for being rolled over by St Mirren in a cup final.
Mind you, what support did Nancy get from the boardroom never mind the dressing room? He held his first press call in the rural silence of Lennoxtown with no one from the board present.
As he kept putting his foot in it over and over again, Nicholson was nowhere to be seen — other than making a brief appearance on the in-house TV station, as usual. Nancy needed guidance. Instead, he was left to sign his own death warrant.
Maybe those in the powerbase had just fallen into a state of inescapable complacency because Russell Martin was making such a Horlicks of it at Rangers back in the early days.
Maybe they felt Hearts, still very early in the Jamestown Analytics experiment, remember, wouldn’t quite have enough gas in the tank or enough depth in the squad to see it through until the very end.
Rangers have invested heavily in January, bringing in the likes of Chukwuani and Skov Olsen
And maybe they won’t, but Hearts have done their business properly within a budget and punched so far above their weight. They have a plan.
Rangers, meanwhile, are a different proposition under their new head coach Danny Rohl and have spent considerable sums on Tuur Rommens, Tochi Chukwuani and Andreas Skov Olsen to try to make what looked like the impossible dream of a title happen with a squad that still has some glaring deficiencies.
Celtic, meanwhile, have brought in a couple of blokes on loan since the January market opened and have an OAP, who hadn’t been in a dugout for six years until Dermot Desmond called this term, scrolling through the contacts list on his mobile when he isn’t preparing for matches or actually standing out on the touchline to see if he can pull some kind of rabbit out of the hat.
It simply isn’t the way a serious club ought to be working. And without wishing any ill-will against O’Neill, who has worked wonders to keep the ship even roughly on track and deserves better himself, it does not merit any kind of reward.
