Overreacting to Defeat is a Bigger Problem Than Defeat Itself

This has been a terrible season. There’s no getting away from that. We started poorly, stumbled on a winning formula by accident only because of injuries to key players, lost the manager as the season entered the business end, a shell-shocked squad still suffering injuries to key players stumbled over the line under an interim boss, and now we’ve (horror of horrors!) lost a meaningless match to Sevco. Many fans are now approaching the Scottish Cup Final, when we have the opportunity to clinch an astonishing third consecutive Treble, with a sense of trepidation.

I didn’t see the match against Sevco today, and I won’t be watching it either, but from what I’ve heard, it sounds a familiar tale – poor, gutless performance and no protection for our players from thuggish assaults. I’m not going to worry about it. There’s no need to worry about it. All I hope for from today is that no one is injured ahead of the only game that matters since last weekend – the Cup Final.

But why has this season been so bad? I can’t believe I’m writing this, we’re on the verge of yet another Treble and fans are up in arms about how bad we are. It’s insane.

But yet, no one can claim it has been good to watch, or that it’s been entertaining, apart from a brief period in the autumn and the few weeks after the winter break before Rodgers left.

The question is why has it been so bad this year, and is there anything that can be done about it?

The first reason is one that recurs throughout the season and continues to reverberate today. Brendan Rodgers. If anyone is to blame for the situation we find ourselves in today, it is Brendan Rodgers. If we fail to win the Treble, the blame will lie with Brendan Rodgers. He sabotaged and undermined us from before the season began and continued to do so throughout the season.

First of all, he wanted away in the summer and did his best to get away. Not only that, he asked the best striker we’ve had in the past decade and a half to go with him. The upshot of that was one very unhappy striker and one (rightly) very unhappy squad. I claim no inside knowledge, but those players are not human if their morale was not badly affected by the knowledge their manager was looking to leave.

The board, rightly, were not willing to give Rodgers any serious money to spend, knowing he would be off first chance he got. They did however shell out serious money to secure Edouard before Rodgers started agitating for a move.

As the season kicked off, it was plain to see things were not right. We laboured to the early points and some of it was awful to watch. It only changed in the autumn with so many injuries, especially to Brown, Ntcham and Eboui, that Rodgers was forced to play McGregor and the hitherto out-in-the-cold Christie in the deep-lying midfield roles. Suddenly, things were happening. Fluidity was restored to the side and we were blowing teams away. Then Brown was able to play again (not fit, just able to play again) and he was restored, thus breaking up the McGregor-Christie partnership that inspired a great run of form through October-November and performances suffered again, culminating in defeat at Ibrox with McGregor playing at left-back and an academy player on his own up front. We were hopeless and were still just an offside call away from a point.

The board, rightly, were still not willing to buy big in the January transfer window, but did sanction several useful loan signings while Sevco spent crazy money on Defoe and Davis, leading to widespread panic, and it wasn’t just Charlie Nicholas. But those loan-signings sparked another mini-run of very good form from January-February before Rodgers finally bailed, just 24 hours before a trip to Tynecastle in midweek and Scottish Cup match at Easter Road that weekend.

He could not have picked two more difficult games to abandon us ahead of and I include Ibrox in that. Not only did he go, he took almost the entire backroom staff with him. If Neil Lennon did not take charge of an absolutely shell-shocked group of players that week, again they are not human. They beat Hearts and Hibernian on muscle-memory alone in the two most important matches of the season.

I’m not going to make a case for giving Neil Lennon the manager’s job permanently. I think we need fresh ideas from a top class foreign coach if we want to progress from here, but he cannot be anything but commended for the way the season has gone since he came in. He had an impossible job to do and has (so far) seen us to where we need to be.

When you look back at this season, the surprising thing is not that we have struggled over the line, the surprising thing is that we are on the verge of a third successive treble. When you think about it, we are actually at a low point. We haven’t been so low in years. And yet here we are sitting as Champions, with a Scottish Cup Final to come.

Think about it from Sevco’s point of view. They are on a seven year high. They think they have a top-class manager. They think they have a great team. Confidence in their camp is sky high. And yet against a stumbling, misfortune-ridden opponent they have still finished second. If ever they had a chance to end our run of league titles, this season was it. And they still fell well short. Beating Celtic today will give them even more hope for next season, but that’s because they are brainless and desperate. They will hold onto any tenuous hope for dear life and they’ll eat this shit up today. The thing about hope though is that it always, in the end, meets reality. And the two very often do not match up. If Sevco had a brain, they’d be dangerous. But they don’t and in their brainlessness think Celtic will be just as bad again next season.

Next season will be different. We will have a new manager in place, so it’s very unlikely we’ll be destabilised by a manager working his ticket out.

The board will back the new manager. I’m not expecting fortunes to be spent, but enough will be spent to address the problems in the playing squad. But the biggest problem in the playing squad is not the quality we have, it’s the lack of stability and leadership they’ve had to endure all season. In my opinion, Neil Lennon should have got those two matches against Hearts and Hibs out of the way and then imposed his philosophy on them. It was a mistake to try to keep Rodgers’ system ticking over because it hadn’t been working for long stretches of the season and he was gone. We know Lennon can do it, he won three titles in a row before he left and took us into the last 16 of the Champions League. He was Rodgers’ most difficult opponent in his time here. Anyway, next season we will have a permanent manager in place and the playing squad will be settled. Without signing a single player, we will be better next season.

The run of injuries suffered this season is also unlikely to be repeated (please!). So when we look ahead to next season, I cannot see things being as bad as they have been this season.

We are at our lowest ebb. Sevco are riding the crest of a self-created wave. In the circumstances, I’m not surprised they won today. The game itself was meaningless and will be very quickly forgotten about. Sevco gained nothing of any substance today and we lost nothing of any substance. They haven’t even won bragging rights – they’re trophyless yet again while we’re (in case you’ve forgotten) Champions and on the verge of another Treble!

The only thing that bothers me about next season is the issue of morale. And that’s an issue for us fans. It’s created by our responses to triumph and disaster and as Kipling said, you need to treat those two imposters just the same.

Only we can stop the run to ten in a row and the first step to doing that is to overreact to a ridiculous degree to losing a meaningless post-season kickabout at Ibrox.