Hugh Keevins says Michael Nicholson must go if we miss the Champions League again. Astonishingly, I agree with him. Then he handed the board a ‘free pardon’…

They say a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Well, Old Shug’s clock ticked yesterday morning, and I nearly fell off my chair.

Because in his usual Sunday sermon in the Record, Hugh Keevins wrote this:

If Celtic fail to qualify for the Champions League for a second season in a row, and an inability to manipulate the transfer window is a contributory factor, the club’s chief executive, Michael Nicholson, must resign.

Or be sacked.

Read that again.

Keevins.

Our Shug.

The man who gave us ‘zero per cent’, calling for Silent Mike’s head in the Daily Record.

I’ve spent years telling you all that this man could not predict sunrise with a calendar and a window, and now here he is writing the very thing fan media has been screaming into the void since Kazakhstan.

So credit where credit is due.

He’s right.

He’s absolutely right.

If we go out to LASK and the reason is a transfer window that was handled with all the urgency of a reconditioned fax machine, then Michael Nicholson cannot still be the CEO of Celtic on the other side of it.

Shug even builds it nicely, to be fair to him.

He points out that Nicholson is a lawyer by trade.

That he’ll have an innate understanding of right from wrong, innocence from guilt.

That a man on eye-watering wages can’t keep delivering jaw-dropping failure without consequences.

And then the line I’d have happily written myself.

Quality being sold without the compensation of adequate replacements being brought in can happen once.

If it happens twice, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would submit that is what’s known as maladministration.

Once is Kairat Almaty.

Twice is a business model.

And Shug, being Shug, finishes the whole thing with ‘I rest my case’, which is a lovely bit of theatre from a man who’s usually first in the queue to give this board the benefit of the doubt.

But here’s where me and Hugh part company.

Because somewhere in the middle of all that, he handed the Celtic board a ‘free pardon’.

His words, not mine.

A free pardon. For the men who built the squad that stunk the place out against Dundee, but then blew Kilmarnock away yesterday.

His argument goes like this.

Nicholson doesn’t carry every can.

What’s it got to do with Silent Mike if strikers can’t strike, wingers can’t cross and Cameron Carter-Vickers spends the night passing it to Viljami Sinisalo?

Not anybody in a suit, says Hugh.

Bollocks.

Who bought only two players in the transfer window thus far, Shug?

Who signed the wingers who can’t cross?

Hence the reason we’re crying out for new wingers?

Who sat on their hands all summer while the Ibrox side, Hearts and Aberdeen filled their boots, and then handed the manager a squad and told him to get on with it?

Was that Martin O’Neill?

Was that the fans who put the flag up the pole?

Or was that a chief executive who has now presided over three windows of the exact same paralysis, taking his instructions from an absent golfer who thinks £3 million is the top of the market and £25 million is the floor?

You cannot indict the man for the transfer window in paragraph two and then acquit him for the football that three failed transfer windows produced in paragraph nine.

That isn’t natural justice.

That’s having it both ways, and it is the single most Keevins thing in the entire article.

Now, in fairness to the players, they answered the Dundee question themselves yesterday.

Five at Rugby Park.

A hat-trick for Kasper Høgh in his second start.

33 attempts on goal, and Neil McCann’s side put to the sword by the same group of men Hugh had written off before lunchtime.

Which rather blows a hole in the ‘nothing to do with anybody in a suit’ theory, doesn’t it??

Give them a striker, and it turns out they can play.

Funny, that.

One striker changed everything in ninety minutes, and this board spent since last January haggling over him before they’d sign the cheque.

So let’s take Keevins at his word for once and hold him to it.

LASK are coming to Celtic Park next week.

A side that have won one of their last 14 European ties.

A side that finished 35th in the Conference League last season.

Thirty. Fifth.

And if this board look at that record and decide that’s a good enough reason to bluff their way through the tie with what they’ve already got, then we will be right back in Almaty with different weather.

Headed for an Almaty shitstorm.

A year ago they apologised for that.

Two apologies in a row would be an insult to our intelligence, and Shug is right about that too.

So no, Michael, the 5-1 does not get you off the hook.

It does not give you the opportunity to tie the purse strings in a quadruple treble knot, with the intention of spending nothing more until the usual gamble that is the CL qualifier has passed.

It buys you a week.

Sign the players, or start clearing your desk, because for once even the Daily Record has your P45 half-typed.

What does Michael actually do when he goes to work every day?

Keevins asked it.

I’ve been asking it for as long as I can remember.

The difference is he’ll have forgotten he asked it by next Sunday, and I won’t.

Get it done, Michael.

Because if you don’t, the jury is already seated…

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