Chris Sutton points the finger at Celtic Board for current crisis
Chris Sutton this morning lays the blame for Celtic’s current crisis not on Martin O’Neill, who he reckons has been shafted, but on the Celtic Board for their shockingly bad recruitment failures this summer…
That he believes is the root cause that has created the shambles we are now enduring with the former Celtic striker predicting things are about to get even worse...
Celtic threw away a 4-0 aggregate lead in Linz to exit the Champions League – yet again – at the playoff stage 5-1 on aggregate after extra time against LASK.
We then papered over the cracks in a number of Scottish Premiership matches before exiting the Premier Sports Cup at Ibrox last Sunday without laying a glove on the Rangers who ran out comfortable 3-0 winners.
Things then went from bad to worse on Thursday night and this time the Celtic horror show was stages at Celtic Park against Hungarian side Ferencvaros who probably couldn’t believe that the gifts were offered quite so easily as they won 3-1.
And it seems that Celtic are caught in the grasps of a perfect storm with the fixture list throwing another Glasgow Derby at us tomorrow lunchtime when we once again take on the Rangers, this time at Celtic Park and in the Scottish Premiership.
Celtic are top of the league, five points ahead of Derek McInnes’ side. This time it will be Celtic who will have 60,000 supporters at the game and a win will open up a significant eight points advantage going into the extended international break.
That though looks a real long shot given the shambles that has unfolded in the key matches listed above which an emotional and clearly hurting Callum McGregor described as Celtic being ‘broken’. With just yesterday and today for Martin O’Neill and his coaching team to sort things out it seems unlikely that we are going to see a very different looking Celtic tomorrow.
Instead maybe we will see a back to basics approach with the commitment, aggression and an end to the torment of the six yard passes and Liam Scales standing lost with his foot on the ball. The late, great Charlie Gallagher once said to me that he was “a fan of the forward pass”. That seems appropriate thing to mention amid this current self inflicted crisis at ‘broken’ Celtic.
Writing in his weekly newspaper column Sutton defended Martin O’Neill and instead pointed the figure at the root cause of this crisis.
“Broken was a word that Callum McGregor used,” Sutton stated in his Daily Record column. “The captain is right. It is broken. Yet the mess Celtic are in at the moment is completely self inflicted.
“Yet another failure of the club’s board in a transfer window has left the squad vulnerable to being exposed and, my word, they are being exposed alright. I don’t like this current pile-on in terms of Martin O’Neill. Put bluntly, he’s been shafted.”
Ominously he added: “Perhaps he should have been stronger in terms of the players coming into the building, he certainly was first time at the club. But the damage is done and he has to fix it. Quickly because, unless there is a major transformation, it’s going to get even worse very quickly.
“It’s up to these players to find the courage and character to cover up for the latest set of boardroom mistakes, yet I’m looking at the assembled group and wondering what Martin is going to do.
“He must have been hoping to get some answers ahead of tomorrow’s momentous rematch” before Sutton then goes through the Celtic horror shows: “Instead, all he got from the Ferencvaros flop was more problems and questions. It was another woeful show.
“In the space of week, Celtic’s obvious frailties and failings have again been brutally laid bare. Deficiencies which could have been addressed in the final month of a transfer window and were not.
“Last weekend at Ibrox was atrocious for Celtic. Defensively flimsy, lightweight and run over in midfield and with nothing on offer in attack. Just like in Austria against LASK.”
Get the Celtic support behind the team
We’ll see what answers the manager and his coaching staff have tomorrow. Heaven help us if it’s more of the same. The 4-3-3 has to be binned and players have to be selected on the basis that they are going to be up for the battle. There can be no passengers, no-one who weakly accepts losing their own battle on the pitch.
Get the Celtic support behind the team. That’s down to the players though after the coaches have ditched the root causes with the self destructive back-pass nonsense. If we go down that route again we already know the outcome.
We’ve watched that horror movie three times already this season.
