Strategy Shift at Celtic? There will only be a Strategy Shift at the club when the current board moves on…

Well, that’s everything sorted now, isn’t it?

Three words, apparently, and the whole club has changed direction.

That’s the line from Ryan McDonald in the Record today, in a piece about Celtic’s ‘transfer strategy shift’, and the three magic words are these.

Quality over quantity.

Martin O’Neill said it.

The club spent £17 million.

Kasper Høgh scored a hat-trick inside 45 minutes at Rugby Park.

And now we’re all supposed to believe something fundamental has shifted at Celtic Football Club.

Has it??

Stop the bus.

Let me get this straight.

Spending big money, sorry no, market prices, on players at Celtic is not a strategy shift, it’s Celtic finally moving with the times.

That’s all it is.

A club with the guts of £100 million in the bank, in a country where it dwarfs everybody, spent £11 million on a striker who can actually score goals.

That isn’t a revolution.

That’s the bare minimum expected of the richest club in Scotland.

Roughly a decade later than it should have arrived.

Now, give credit where credit is due, because I said I’d be first in the queue when they got something right.

Kasper Høgh is everything we’ve been screaming for since Kyogo walked out the door.

63 seconds at Rugby Park, and then two more before half-time.

The first Premiership hat-trick by a Celtic player since Jamesie Forrest put three past Hibs in October 2022, which tells you everything about the four years in between.

Benjamin Nygren looks like a different footballer with a real number nine in front of him.

Camilo Duran will come good the moment somebody stops playing him at right wing.

The football on Sunday was the most fun I’ve had watching this team in a long, long time, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But a hat-trick is not a strategy.

One good striker does not undo three windows of the exact same paralysis, it just proves what we were denied for all three of them.

Because here’s what the Record piece skips past in its rush to hand out the bouquets.

We have two new signings.

Two.

Fewer than any other club in the SPFL.

From the wealthiest club in the country.

With a Champions League qualifier sitting there in eight days’ time.

The Ibrox side, Hearts, Aberdeen, Hibs, every single one of them has done more business than us this summer.

Every. Single. One.

And the £17 million the Record is so impressed with?

Have a look at what left the building before a penny of it was spent, and then come back and tell me about our bold new spending strategy.

Net spend at Celtic is what it always is.

Close to nothing.

You must always follow the money at Celtic, because every pound is a prisoner for the double billionaire.

Now think about what last summer looked like.

Kyogo Furuhashi, a genuine goalscorer, had been gone since the previous January.

He wasn’t replaced.

This board then replaced him with £1.5 million of Shin Yamada, a player Brendan Rodgers didn’t even want, thinking he could do the same thing as Kyogo Furuhashi just because he was Japanese.

He scored precisely zero, before flopping on loan in the German second tier.

Then in January they brought in Tomas Cvancara and Junior Adamu on loan, and the pair of them managed three goals between them.

Three.

That is the same board, taking instruction from the same absent golfing meddler, being told this morning that they’ve undergone a strategy shift.

Pull the other one…seriously.

A strategy shift means the people making the decisions change, not that they finally, grudgingly, one time out of ten, make the right one.

And this is where yesterday comes back into it.

Because as I wrote yesterday, Hugh ‘Nostradamus’ Keevins of all people used the word ‘maladministration’ about our chief executive.

He said Michael Nicholson should resign, or be sacked, if we miss the Champions League for a second season running.

Old Shug was right.

He was absolutely right, and I nearly fell off my chair typing it.

Then, being Shug, he handed the board a ‘free pardon’ about three paragraphs later.

Which is exactly the move the Record has pulled again today, just with prettier numbers.

Høgh scores three, the mood music in the stands lifts, and the men who spent an entire summer haggling over him get to stroll away from the scene of the crime.

Whistling.

They’re not the architects of Sunday.

They’re the reason Sunday took until the second week of August to arrive.

Silent Mike doesn’t get a promotion for eventually buying a striker, that’s the job, that’s what the salary is for.

I don’t get showered in praise when I go to work and do what I’m paid to do, so why should he?

Get Haissem Hassan over the line before Thursday’s deadline, and I’ll say the same thing about that one.

Good.

Well done.

Now do it again, four or five more times, and do it before the tie, not after it.

Because LASK are coming to Celtic Park, and this board’s entire history tells us exactly what happens next.

They’ll bluff their way through it with what they’ve got, and hope the striker bails them out.

That’s not quality over quantity.

That’s the same gamble they lost in Kazakhstan, dressed up in a new tracksuit.

So no, there has been no ‘strategy shift’ at Celtic.

There has been one good signing, one glorious afternoon in Ayrshire, and a fanbase so starved of both that a hat-trick reads like a manifesto.

The strategy shift comes the day the board moves on.

Not a minute before…

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