Celtic seem to have some kind of strategy, the Ibrox side has strategic chaos. Are the Americans in danger of losing total control of the situation at Ibrox?

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

That’s Andrew Cavenagh, that is.

A man who runs a health insurance firm in Pennsylvania, standing in front of a room full of Scottish shareholders, and reaching for a line he got off a LinkedIn post.

Now, I wrote a piece last night about Staunch Del and where his troubles actually started.

Judging by the reaction it got for a Friday night, a fair few of you were still up and reading it.

So let’s carry it on this morning.

Because Andy Newport in the Record has gone after the men upstairs rather than the man in the dugout, and he’s landed a few.

Because the manager is the symptom over there, and Newport has finally gone looking for the disease.

Here’s the line that stopped me.

The 12 months under Cavenagh have been an exercise in crisis management, blundering from one emergency response to the next, with the situation only deepening, seldom improving.

That’s the Daily Record.

Not a Celtic blog, not a wind-up merchant on Twitter, the Daily Record.

And he’s right.

Twelve months, three head coaches, and not one line you could draw between any of them.

Russell Martin and his blind idealism.

Then Danny Röhl and his ‘pragmatism’.

And now Staunch Del and his old-school man management, wheeled in to shout the whole thing back into shape in his platform brogues.

Three men, three completely different philosophies, hired by the same board inside a single calendar year.

That isn’t a strategy.

That’s a man panic-buying managers the way his club panic-buys players.

And the squad tells you the exact same story, because it’s three separate rebuilds stitched into one another.

Newport put it better than I could.

McInnes desperately trying to stitch together nine of his own signings into the remnants of Martin’s rebuild from last year and the cover-up work done by Rohl in January.

In one door, out the other, all summer long, and none of it settling into a shape.

A Martin squad underneath, a Röhl patch job in the middle, and a Del layer sprayed over the top of it in July.

Then Yokota takes seven weeks to arrive.

Then Chermiti’s knee goes the week after they knock back a big bid for him.

The final nail in the coffin?

Couhaib Driouech fails his medical and the whole thing collapses.

Three weeks of the window left, and they’re back at the drawing board with a manager who has been begging for a forward since the day he walked in.

Now compare and contrast, because this is the bit I still can’t quite believe I’m typing.

Hassan is in.

Baur is in.

Emenalo looks done, Gineitis is being worked on, and the Record reckons there are six more in the pipeline.

Somebody at Celtic Park wrote a list back in July, and the list is actually being worked through.

I read that leaked list out on the Trinity Tims over three weeks ago and assumed, as we all did, that it would die a death like every other list this board has ever been handed.

It hasn’t.

That is a strategy.

It might be a strategy that was forced on them by a manager who refused to be messed about.

It might be a strategy they arrived at kicking and screaming.

But it exists, and you can see the shape of it.

Over at Ibrox, there is no shape at all.

Which brings me to the part where I have to eat a bit of my own cooking.

For a year now I have used the 49ers as a stick to beat our own board with.

Ruthless American professionals over there, 34% amateurs over here, that was the gag.

Paraag Marathe and his San Francisco operation running rings round Silent Mike and the absent golfing meddler.

Well.

I’d like to formally withdraw it.

Because what Cavenagh and Marathe have produced in twelve months isn’t ruthless professionalism.

It’s a blizzard of buzzwords with a football club buried somewhere underneath it.

Amateurs, the pair of them.

Just a better-dressed version of it.

“Fly the plane while we’re building it.”

“Working 25/8.”

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Executive babble, the lot of it, and Newport called it exactly that.

Turns out you can hire the smartest men in the room and still end up in the Conference League play-off against Jablonec.

And here’s the question the Record danced around without quite asking it outright.

Are these men still in control of that football club?

Because look at the body count.

Russell Martin, gone after a fan backlash.

Patrick Stewart, gone.

Kevin Thelwell, gone.

Three senior figures removed inside a year.

Every single time after the klanbase turned.

Every single time the board followed rather than led.

That’s not a board making decisions.

That’s a board being told what its decisions are.

They’ve now sacrificed everybody they can sacrifice apart from themselves, and the only names left on the list are Cavenagh and Marathe.

The bed sheets came out for Charles Green.

They came out for Dave King.

You think an American health insurance executive who talks about culture eating strategy is going to be the one they spare?

But before anybody at our end gets too comfortable, remember where you are.

The same men are still upstairs at Celtic Park.

The same magic £3 million ceiling, the same phone call to Barbados, the same instinct to haggle over a couple of hundred grand until the price goes up.

Arne Engels is on his way to West Ham and I’d still like somebody to explain why that couldn’t wait five days until after Wednesday.

One good fortnight does not buy back three bad windows.

So no, I’m not declaring us fixed.

I’m saying that for the first time in about two years, one Glasgow club appears to know what it’s doing and the other one is making it up as it goes along.

So, the scorecard from last night.

I said their window was a supermarket sweep with the trolley on fire, and Thursday settled that one.

I said the panic buying would carry on regardless, and Driouech’s medical settled that one too.

The third one?

Whether the Ibrox side can survive the visit of St. Mirren in the League Cup, is still sitting there unanswered.

Roll on tomorrow evening.

Two out of three, and everything I’ve written this morning about strategy and chaos gets re-marked at about 7 o’clock tomorrow night.

Sunday evenings are becoming great fun, I have to say.

Because that’s how it works over there.

Now, we don’t get to laugh fully at their crisis management until we’ve proved we’ve stopped doing our own.

We’ll see how we’re fixed ourselves on that score next Wednesday evening…

We aren’t quite out of the woods ourselves just yet.

But you’re enjoying watching their crisis a wee bit more than you should be, aren’t you?

You are, don’t you…

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