Picking up the Pieces: Who’s to blame?

I haven’t quite shaken that empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, we haven’t qualified for the Champions League since the 2013/14 season now. I still love watching the competition – the big matches among the footballing giants, the last minute winners and the early demolition jobs. But my excitement levels will never be the same as when Celtic are in the mix.

I won’t comment too much on the game itself, all I’ll say is that this wasn’t a “oh we played our heart out” performance, this was a “God, this team really doesn’t cut the mustard” performance. Even the most optimistic of fans cannot be happy with what happened in that game, constantly losing possession, no sign of a midfield for the first half, even resorting to lumping the ball away.

I am not one to blame the manager and I cannot say that it was Ronny’s fault in any way. We look like world-beaters when we face competition in the SPFL, scoring goals is not a problem, we can fall asleep occasionally at the back, but it’s never as bad against a Scottish team. This is a key issue, not to pull a John Collins type of statement, but we are too good for the SPFL and not good enough for the champions’ league, and it looks like we will be stuck in this limbo for quite a while. If anyone thinks I am being too reactionary and pessimistic then I would be happy to hear their point of view, but I think we belong in the Champions’ League, obviously not this squad of players, but definitely this club as we have a great record in the competition.

We would be fools to not look at the transfer market, I know we don’t have a lot of money to spend but for the last two seasons we have operated at a profit of £8 million, the board can definitely dip into their pockets more or else we will never compete at a higher level. If we look at the Premier League, every other club has had to increase their spending to keep up with the competition. As the SPFL doesn’t pay a lot, Celtic will always be safe, we don’t need to keep spending more and more as the competing teams won’t be either. Our current strategy seems to be to buy low-priced young players who are very raw talents and hope that they suit the level of football we want to play at. For this season, this hasn’t worked, I fully support signing Janko and Boyata, but they are too inexperienced, it’s a lot to ask of them to perform at Champions League level – they needed protecting, not thrown in at the deep end. We needed a bit of experience for this game, shut down the game completely and play for the 0-0 draw. We definitely drew the hardest team possible, but we should still be securing our place in the group stages.

I’d love to see some comments about how we can mend our poor run of performances through the qualification process, is it more money? The team being too inexperienced at this level? Or have Celtic dropped off the map and we aren’t the team we once were?