Operation Soothe is in full swing after LASK, as the SMSM promise the bears more recruits to ‘topple Celtic’. Shouldn’t tonight’s worry be Jablonec?

Last night, Celtic put three past LASK at Celtic Park without reply.

This afternoon, the Record published a masterplan to topple us.

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Operation Soothe, right on schedule.

The ink was barely dry before the SMSM went to work on their readership.

Not to report on Scottish football, but to keep the bears calm after a night that went well for us.

Camilo Duran announced himself with a beautiful brace, we added a third, and we take a 3-0 lead to Linz.

That is a Champions League play-off tie all but finished after 90 minutes.

Across the city tonight, they face FK Jablonec in front of their own support.

Not in the Champions League.

Not even in the Europa League.

A Conference League qualifier, the third tier of European football, and they still have to get through it.

So what does Scott McDermott lead with in this afternoon’s Record, on a morning when there’s a genuine European story sitting right under his nose?

A shopping list.

The plan isn’t to beat Jablonec tonight, or Aberdeen a week on Sunday, the plan is to topple Celtic

Here is how he framed the whole exercise:

That could be his whack as McInnes somehow tries to recover from a poor start in the league to get R*****s challenging Celtic for a title.

Challenging Celtic.

Always us.

Never the other eleven clubs in this division who take points off them every season.

Dundee United did it too, and nobody at the Record wrote a masterplan about Tannadice.

Because Tannadice doesn’t sell papers to a support that needs talking down off a ledge this morning.

We do.

Headed for twenty players through the door at Ibrox, and every one of them signed to stop us

Let’s total up, item by item, exactly what the man reckons McInnes still needs handed to him.

Eight were in before a ball was kicked, and Del was pleading for more that same week.

Since then they have added James Penrice and Kosta Nedjelkovic, plus Dan Neil and Vanja Dragojevic in the middle.

And McDermott reckons, in black and white, that even that lot still isn’t the half of it.

The Ibrox gaffer knows he probably still needs five more players for the squad to resemble how he wants it to look.

Five more players, on top of the twelve or so who have already walked through that door.

A striker in Kevin Kelsy to cover the injured Youssef Chermiti.

Amario Cozier-Duberry from Brighton to give Daisuke Yokota a rival on the right.

Another wide left man, because Djeidi Gassama and Findlay Curtis apparently aren’t enough.

A left sided centre half, because as their own man admits, he doesn’t have one.

And then a midfielder, if Nico Raskin and Connor Barron follow Mo Diomande out the door.

Almost twenty players in a single window, and they still can’t tell you who starts on Saturday.

And not one of those signings is framed as a player who might beat Dundee United or Aberdeen.

Every one of them is signed to stop Celtic.

Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about how that club actually sees itself?

Well, below is how they see themselves right from the horses mouth on Follow Follow:

They are not building a team to win a league, they are building one to beat a single side in it, and they’ll take their chances with the rest.

Their own man has admitted in print that they’ve had no Callum McGregor since Ryan Jack left Govan

This was the line that actually stopped me.

An orchestrator doing the kind of job Callum McGregor does for Celtic. R*****s haven’t had that type of player since Steven Davis and Ryan Jack were in Govan.

Read that again.

The measuring stick for their midfield, in their own paper, is our captain.

Not a player at their own club, past or present, and certainly not one of their own.

Ours, and he wrote it in a piece that’s supposed to be cheering them up.

And here’s the thing, he’s not wrong. They haven’t got one, and you don’t buy a Callum McGregor on deadline day with whatever is left in the pot.

You develop one over a decade and you build a team around him.

But that would require patience, and patience doesn’t soothe anybody in the middle of August, does it?

The 5-1 against St Mirren is being sold as a turning point, and it was a cup tie

Of course, the piece needs a bit of hope in it somewhere.

So Sunday’s five goal romp over St Mirren gets wheeled out as the evidence.

R*****s scored five but it could have been seven or eight.

Aye, fair enough, it could have been seven or eight.

It also came in a Premier Sports Cup tie, after a poor league start McDermott himself acknowledges two paragraphs later.

Now, in fairness to the man, he does concede that start has been all over the place.

The honesty is in there somewhere, if you go looking hard enough for it.

But it’s buried under a headline promising four key positions and a mad scramble, and the headline is the bit the bears will read.

Give them a hammering of St Mirren, a list of names, and a title challenge.

Anything at all, so long as it isn’t tonight, and so long as it isn’t Jablonec.

Because tonight there is a Czech side in Govan, and a European campaign that could be over by half past nine.

Wouldn’t you rather be talking about Cozier-Duberry and a title challenge, if you were them?

Shouldn’t that be the story this afternoon, rather than a wish list for September?

And we’ll be in Linz nursing a three goal cushion, in a competition they’ll be watching from the sofa.

Soothe away, lads…

Choose Read Celtic as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.