In Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum of All Fears, the United States and Russia hover on the edge of a nuclear war, because of misunderstandings and the terror they cause in both nations. There is a moment, when the tension is highest, when an accident at a Russian nuclear missile silo results in a fire causing the US defence satellites over Russia to register a launch.
Fortune’s five goals so far for Celtic is more than half Laffery’s total return in a Rangers jersey
In the short time before the mistake is corrected, the eternally vigilant watchers at NORAD believe they’ve fallen off the edge of the world, that control has been lost, that they’ve just witnessed the beginning of the end of life itself.
In Vienna, as the clock reached the 20 minute mark, our manager must have seen his own version of that kind of Hell. 3-0 down, the press box salivating after his recent comments, the pencils sharpening, history books being re-written, Artmedia a pale shadow of what might be just ahead in the road. Somehow, he kept the faith, refused to panic and on the field things stabilised. Four minutes later, his biggest gamble yet, Marc Antoine Fortune, scored the goal which set up one of the best comebacks we’ve ever witnessed as Celtic fans.
Our manager did not deserve to be placed in that position.
Some things are so self-evident they don’t need drum banging to make the point. At the close of the last transfer window, I went into hyperbolic overdrive over on Celtic Quick News about how the board had hamstrung the manager. What infuriated me most was Peter Lawell, following the Europa League draw, talking about how we could go on and “do another Seville”, when everyone knew the playing squad was just not up to a task of that magnitude.
The troops over on CQN were split about 60/40 that day, most believing the man at the helm had a good enough group of players on hand to go forward. I was in the vocal minority, who thought nothing good could come from signing only one new striker, and letting a central defender go out on loan, leaving us with the same old faces at the back. Within days our frustration was to peak, with the news Marc Antoine Fortune’s injury was worse than expected, ruling him out for nearly two months, and the staggering information that our new signing Zeng Zhi would not be eligible for Europe. The fact a player who, according to the manager, he had been tracking for months, and who had been without a club and available for nothing, hadn’t been signed on time to beat the European deadline made us look pedestrian at best, amateurish at worst.
The two key areas of the field where we had really needed to strengthen still looked horrendously short of quality. The first, of course, was the forward line. The second was the centre of defence. The deficiencies in both these areas have proved as costly as I suspected they might, that and some horrendous bad luck, the likes of which I’ve rarely seen a new manager suffer. Our Champions League draws were as bad as they could possibly have been, with us first being sent to Russia and then to London to face Arsenal. Our Europa League group was tough too, but not so tough we didn’t have a chance. We have finished third in a group which, at another time, we might have done well in, and so we are once more out of all European competition before Christmas.
Thankfully, amidst all the negatives, there are positives too, and sure signs that, with a good January window, we can go on and do great things as a club again. As far as I am concerned, the jury is in on the manager. We definitely have the right man at the helm here. It took me a while to see it.
My views on Tony Mowbray have come full circle in the last month or so. On the night Hearts knocked us out of the League Cup at home, I was furious, though not beyond words, unfortunately, at the way we played that game. The team looked very disjointed, as though they were playing together for the first time. There were glaring problems all across the pitch, and I went onto Celtic Quick News at full time and slaughtered the manager, the team and the board; everyone at Celtic Park, basically, but the kit-man and the guy who makes the tea.
One of the questions I asked my fellow Tims was, “is this manager good enough to take us forward?” I came close to calling for him to be sacked. Following our total collapse against Falkirk, I slaughtered everyone once again, and hammered home the point that a decision needed to be taken by someone at the top of our house as to how the manager would be funded in January, as I saw no sign that we were near good enough as a team, and that clear problems existed between the manager and his players. At the time, I was seriously worried for Big Tony and for the future of our club if the major issues were not resolved.
Now, looking at what has happened since, I believe we’re seeing team spirit flooding back, and certain players are looking sharp, capable and the results are starting to show on the pitch. We are getting our swagger back.
Glaring deficiencies remain, and that is obvious to anyone who watches our side with any regularity; indeed, even the casual observer can see them first hand on any given match-day. Clearly, those key areas, in defence and upfront, still need to be strengthened, if not cleaned out entirely.
What offers encouragement to me most is that we have a man at the helm now who does not insult the intelligence of the fans with such claptrap as suggesting our central defence could not be replaced unless EPL style money was being spent. Gordon Strachan, who has my enormous thanks for three title wins, was ultimately the wrong man to be running our side precisely because of statements and opinions like that one. I will be very interested to see whether he still believes what he told us and backs it up by offering us anything for McManus, Caldwell or Loovens in the coming transfer window period.
Right now, offers of anything over a million would be hard to turn down.
The point is, our man at the helm knows the things we know. He sees things the way we see them, and he knows McManus, Caldwell and Loovens are part of the problem, not the solution. His early comments about how many West Brom players who were at the club when he arrived were still there when he left have taken on a deep resonance when you view those three. I would be willing to wager that by the start of next season none of those players will be with us, and if they are it will be as backups, to be used only in a crisis.
Their presence in this team has already been costly; we have dropped points in Europa League games because of their lacking positional sense and inept efforts to pass the ball from the back. The defeat away at Hapoel Tel Aviv was shocking but avoidable. The shocking error which gave Rapid Vienna the lead at Parkhead was equally awful. The debacle early in the season at Ibrox, where we lost both goals in the first 17 minutes, a match with echoes of the more recent Rapid Vienna game, was characterised by appalling errors, as were the recent matches against Dundee Utd and Falkirk, games we would have won but for those lapses.
The need to sort out the defence is obvious. Darren O’Dea, who cannot get a game on-loan at Reading, can feel slightly aggrieved; whilst he hasn’t been outstanding in Celtic colours, it is hard to remember a mistake as glaring as some of those above, and right now he would walk into the Celtic side. Likewise, young Josh Thompson must know it is only a matter of time before his lack of experience is seen as a lesser concern to our manager than his team-mates lack of ability.
It must be galling to Tony Mowbray, a fine defender himself, that he inherits a side which is missing such a crucial ingredient as a Balde, Mjallby, Valgaeren, Reiper, Stubbs or Elliot; any one of those players would command an instant place in our team, and if Tony himself were fit and able to play there would be no-one in the present squad to touch him.
This is the crucial problem area. One player is definitely required in January, to shore things up and to put our current defenders on notice. Their performances to date have cost us league points and probably a place in the Europa League draw on Friday. To continue with them is unacceptable, and as Big Tony has already made that clear, it falls on the board to back his judgement.
In the medium term, Loovens will have to either step up his game or find another side. Even in the short term, Stephen McManus looks completely out of his league in the pantheon of Celtic captains. On his bad days, and there are more of them with each passing year, he clearly should be nowhere near a Celtic jersey; his few fleeting moments of glory, where I thought he looked like a player, are surrounded on all sides by great stretches of mediocrity at best. At worst he looks like someone who has won a contest to become a footballer for a day. He has no positional sense, no ability to pass or header a ball and is too easily beaten for pace. His slack pass in the first minute against Rapid Vienna was all too common for him. He was so bad at times I pined for the return of Gary Caldwell, a player worth nowhere near the crazy money he is asking for to stay, and who, if an offer over £500,000 comes in for we should take whilst we can still get a transfer fee.
In 19 games in Europe, all for Rangers, Boyd has scored only three times. (Henrik Larsson, in 58 European appearances for Celtic scored a staggering 35 times by the way.)
The best thing I can say for these guys, the only good thing, is that they aren’t the worst Celtic defence I’ve seen in my twenty-odd years of actually watching the side; this, as all of you will know, is no compliment.
Aside from the poor central defence, Mowbray inherited The Gang who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. If the transfer window just past had me feeling like I’d be robbed, the closure of the January window last year had me absolutely furious with Gordon Strachan, Peter Lawell, John Reid and the entire board of directors. With Rangers collapsing in instalments, or so it seemed, we needed only sign a halfway decent striker to have wrapped up four-in-a-row and hammer a final nail into the coffin of our greatest rivals, and we didn’t.
????: MonTheHoops - Member Moderated Celtic Forum http://www.monthehoops.co.uk/showthread.php?p=391161
The need for a new striker was evident as early as October last year, as we started dropping points willy-nilly, partly due to poor defending, but most obviously as we didn’t possess the firepower to kill teams off. The failure to acknowledge this and fix the problem cost us the title, and, of course, gave Rangers automatic passage into the group stages of the Champions League. The fun we all got out of watching them there has in no way made up for the fact we ought to have been there in their place. The board still has a lot to answer for on that.
Of the strikers we had available, two of the three culprits for last season’s disaster still remain. The other, Big Jan, was gone early, and he has done nothing at Hull to suggest we made a mistake cutting him loose. Too late to save our title, the board found some money under the mattress and a new striker was purchased. Marc Antoine Fortune was brought in.
For some, it has proved a controversial choice, but mostly the controversy is of the usual kind; trouble-making, stirred up by our friends in the sporting press, for at no time in the recent history of the game has one player been so targeted for media criticism before he had even kicked a ball in anger. Let’s start with Hugh Keevins, as he is always good for a laugh. When Chris Killen scored twice against Spurs in our pre-season win at Wembley, Keevins’ column the following day opened with that, but in the most twisted way; he stated that such a statistic, two for Killen and none for Fortune, would be “unacceptable” to Celtic fans once competitive football got underway. When Fortune did not score in the win against Aberdeen on the first day of the league campaign, his critics had a field day, including on some Celtic forums, where the fans should have known better. Yet, he laid on two of the goals in that match, and looked superb.
Still, the knives came out. His scoring record was pored over with a scrutiny wholly missing when the press were asked to write about legendry Rangers signings such as Filip Sebo (six goals in thirty-two games for Austria Vienna before they signed him, two in twenty four at the club and five goals in fifty-one matches in France since), Franny Jeffers (seven goals in sixty games for three teams in the four years before signing, no goals in eight matches with them and nine goals in the sixty-four games since) and Filipo Maniero (twenty goals in the seventy-six games he played in the three years before signing, and who never played for Rangers competitively or again after he took their money to sat in the stand).
Fortune has never been a proven goal scorer, and from the moment he was signed Tony Mowbray was at great pains to point this out, stating he had been signed for the other qualities he offered up front, namely that he would create chances for other players and help the forwards around him score more. His absence in our side has been greatly missed for this reason alone, but in those games where he has been fit, he has shown he has goals in him too. His five so far for Celtic are separated by that long spell out injured, which limited his ability to influence events like our early Europa League setbacks and the League Cup defeat by Hearts. Nevertheless, in five European matches for us, he now has two goals. As the press is fond of reporting Kris Boyd’s goal scoring record, let me enlighten those who don’t know certain aspects of it. In 19 games in Europe, all for Rangers, Boyd has scored only three times. (Henrik Larsson, in 58 European appearances for Celtic scored a staggering 35 times by the way.)
Yet, as well as Fortune’s European record stacks up next to Boyd’s, he should be more properly compared to another Rangers player, one who cost similar money and has been at Rangers now for a year and a half, none of it attracting the same media pressures, or the same scrutiny. His name is Kyle Lafferty.
Fortune’s three goals for Celtic in eight SPL matches since the season began easily beats Kyle Laffery and his return of zero goals in the same time frame, and his five in all competitions from fourteen games stacks up nicely alongside the Rangers strikers’ awful return of zero goals in twelve. Needless to say, Kyle Lafferty, in four European games is yet to score.
More interestingly, and which I am sure would have remained almost unknown, as the press would certainly not have draw attention to it, Fortune’s five goals so far for Celtic is more than half Laffery’s total return in a Rangers jersey; he has a mere nine goals in forty-four matches since Burnley took their money with a grin. He cost the Ibrox club £3.75 million, yet it’s the Frenchman who still attracts criticism from the Scottish press, and all that despite being a model professional, in contrast to Laffery’s well-known penchant for cheating.
Tony Mowbray’s team building plan is just getting underway. Asia’s Young Player of the Year is about to join for £2 million, to augment our Far Eastern appeal, with China’s team captain already in the squad. Our third place finish in our Europa League Group is awful, yet it disguises some fundamental truths. Our side has had a slow start. The defeats in Tel Aviv and at home to Hamburg could easily have been cancelled out in our draws against the German’s away, where we created good chances but couldn’t score, and in the match at home against Rapid, where we were easily the better team and on another night, perhaps with big Marc Antoine Fortune up front, we would have won comfortably. With more clinical finishing, we might have even have beaten Hamburg at home, instead of losing 1-0, and better defending would certainly have given us the result in Israel.
Two draws away in the groups, including the stunning 3-3 comeback in Vienna, have taken one monkey off our backs, which is our inability to get results in group games away from home. Yes, it was the Europa League and not the Champions League, but that is semantics. Our win in Moscow has shown we can cut it in the top competition against good sides, when the chips are down and the pressure is on. Curiously, it was our home form, normally so solid, which let us badly down in the European theatre this year, but even that was improved with the return match against Hapoel Tel Aviv. (It also might be worth remembering that had the group games been traditional UEFA Cup two-leg knock-out affairs that we’d have beaten both Rapid and Hapoel due to our second leg results, to add to the win we secured over the Russians. Arsenal beat us resoundingly, and Hamburg would have beaten us by a single goal. Rangers, in contrast, would have lost 5-1 to Sevilla, 5-2 to Unirea and 3-1 to Stuttgart.)
Domestically, we are one point behind Rangers in the league, and out of the League Cup. I refuse to overlook the significance of either; both are awful, and inexcusable, yet recent form has suggested things are getting better. Those two negative traits, bad defending and poor finishing, are the reasons why our domestic form is little better than our European results.
This manager has passed the test, however. His ideas about how the game should be played are right. The form of certain players has lit up the stands, even when things have not gone well; he has found the key which unleashes the real Aiden McGeady, he has given Giorgios Samaras back his self belief, so crucial to his own form, which of late has been sensational, and he spotted genius in the feet of young Nial McGinn, who has been a shining diamond in the matches where we have seen him play. Tony Mowbray has also let loose the man-who-could-be-legendry, Paddy McCourt and has given a long-awaited extended run to Marc Crosas, who with N’Guemo in midfield has powered our recent run.
Scott Brown is out injured at the moment, and when fit he has looked a pale shadow of the player we paid so much for. Yet, no-one in the game knows him better than Tony Mowbray, the man who blooded him as a youngster at Hibs, and who believes in him unquestioningly. If anyone can make Brown into the player we hope him capable of being, this is the guy to do it.
The transfer window opens in a matter of days. Press reports have linked us with a mind-boggling list of names, at the front of which are Giroud and Robbie Keane, the former a relatively new arrival on football’s big stage, and a first-timer on the Celtic rumours list. The second, of course, is the Rumour that Will Not Die, and seems unlikely at best.
But something has to give. The closing of the previous two transfer windows put the support on a downer and produced failure, the result of which was that lack of ambition meeting head-on with the cold hard facts of life in the modern game. The first failure cost us our league flag, and handed Rangers the financial lifeline which has kept them from slipping into oblivion. The second cost us any hope we had of progressing in the Europa League, it probably contributed to our early exit from the League Cup and it has cost us valuable points in the SPL campaign. A third such failure to invest in the team, and give us the shot in the arm needed to propel us forward, will see the club lurch backward and put the fans on a war footing, where the slightest spark could provoke open rebellion.
Losing another league to this bereft Rangers team, and handing them a further financial boost, would be an event from which our club’s owners might not recover. Attendances are down. The fans are frustrated by the lack of direction. The empty seats at the Hapoel game are the harbingers of dark days ahead if the fans devotion to the cause continues to be taken for granted. The Celtic support is the most loyal out there, but we have our limits, and they have been tested in recent years by a combination of turgid football and lack of investment in the team. The football is back, as Tony Mowbray seeks to rebuild our reputation as a side based on playing the Beautiful Game beautifully. But in terms of that lack of investment, the writing is definitely on the wall for all to see. The troops are no longer prepared to shovel their money blindly into the club if their cash is not used to pursue glory but to satisfy an irrational policy of zero debt.
Peter Lawell, standing there at the Europa League draw, talking about another Seville, forgot the most basic tenant of public relations and advertising; you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. His failure to deliver the cash to strengthen the team on the field resulted in the fans voting with their feet off the field when it came to purchasing tickets for those games. The half empty stadium against the Israelis was not just a consequence of it being a match with no real importance in terms of our place in the group; it was a calculated snub to a policy which has led us down a disastrous road. In our heart of hearts we, the fans, knew that a setback like the campaign just ended was coming, we knew we weren’t good enough to do another Seville, and we knew learning that lesson could be a painful and traumatic experience. We also knew something else. We knew it could all have been avoided. Nothing we’ve seen so far, none of the bad, has come as a surprise. For twenty odd minutes against Rapid Vienna, however, all of our worst nightmares were awfully realised, and that was a scary experience.
Never again. In Vienna, we saw the best and the worst of New Celtic, and we saw what might have been and what still may be. It is the next few weeks which will tell the tale, and map our future. Do we go forward, or backward? Do we spend and risk something or do nothing ...... and risk everything?
My view is clear. The manager has passed the test. He must be given the tools to do the job ... because if he fails, he will carry the can, but not the blame. None of us will be in any doubt where it, ultimately, lies.
Desmond, Lawell and Reid – the manager has started to put things right. Now it’s up to you. Back him, and this club will progress and reach the next level. I don’t doubt it for a minute. Fail to do so, and pray it doesn’t cost us. If it does, a good and decent man, Tony Mowbray, will be the first to fall on his sword, but he will not be the last. You will bear the guilt, and you too will pay the price.
This time we have to get it right. There will be no acceptable excuses for failure. The manager knows it needs to be done, he has said so, and the fans will back his judgement over a shiny balance sheet any day of the week.
Failure is not an option here. You have been warned.
M A Fortune 5 Kyle Laugh-At-Me 0
