Hugh Keevins has looked at the Celtic directors box and noticed the board aren’t ambitious – welcome to the party, Shug, we’ve been here since May

This morning, Hugh Keevins has had a good long look at the Celtic directors box and reached a conclusion.

The people who run our football club are not ambitious.

I know.

Sit down for a minute and let that one wash over you.

Here it is in the Record, for anybody with the stomach for a Sunday morning.

And here is what makes it such an infuriating read.

He’s right.

Not partly right, not right by accident – right about very nearly all of it.

The problem isn’t that Keevins is wrong this week, it’s that he’s writing our own copy back to us

Because that is all this is.

Every single beat of it.

He watched the LASK game, clocked the usual suspects in the box, then noticed who wasn’t there.

Here’s what he had to say:

There was, of course, no sign of Dermot Desmond, the club’s principal shareholder and the man who is, to all intents and purposes, Celtic’s owner.

Even on a European night of superlative entertainment punctuated by stunning goals to enrapture the crowd, Dermot was where he always is when Celtic play.

Somewhere else.

Now, I am not going to argue with a word of that.

I can’t.

It’s the truth, and it has been the truth for years.

Martin O’Neill is 74 years old and lately out of hospital, and he was in his seat.

Rod Stewart is 80 with a heart operation behind him, and he was in his seat.

And the man who effectively owns the place could not be bothered making the trip.

What does that tell you about the ambition in that boardroom?

Somewhere else, as Shug puts it – and it’s a good line, I’ll give him that much.

The absent meddling golfer, as we’ve been calling him here for a very long time now.

Ambition only turns up in a Keevins column after the support have spent a summer forcing the issue

And that is the part he walks straight past.

He tells us the board had to be coerced into doing business.

He asks what other institution of Celtic’s size needs a fan base boycotting matches and merchandise before it will sign a player.

Great question, Hugh.

We’ve been asking it since May.

Kasper Hogh, Camilo Duran, Mika Baur and Haissem Hassan did not arrive because somebody in that boardroom woke up feeling ambitious.

They arrived because the support made it impossible for them not to.

Empty seats, a quiet Celtic Superstore, and a mood that was turning very ugly indeed.

That was written about in fan media weeks ago.

Repeatedly.

By everybody.

Is a single word of it new to you?

Nobody in the mainstream was interested in it then.

And now here it is on a Sunday morning, dressed up as a column, with a byline on it.

Nobody is taking Tuesday night in Austria for granted, and it’s taken him four days to catch up

He’s right here too, of course.

Three goals is a lead, not a tie won.

He quotes O’Neill saying his side rode their luck and that the whole thing is still in the balance.

He points at Cameron Carter-Vickers and Auston Trusty and says the back door is still swinging.

Bollocks, if you look at the way CCV commanded his box by the end of that game on Wednesday night.

He looked like the CCV of old.

Like the game against LASK had awakened all of his old instincts.

Not by force, but by a gradual melding with the atmosphere around him, and the recognition within himself that he was meant for nights like Wednesday night.

Merging it all into a single, smooth, unified whole.

All of it also said, at length, by every Celtic fan channel and every fan writer in the country from about ten o’clock on Wednesday night.

So what exactly is he telling us that we did not already know on Thursday morning?

Two months ago this same man was telling us Celtic needed Peter Lawwell back to steady the ship

And this is where he loses me completely.

On the 29th of June, I wrote about a Keevins column that argued Celtic were rudderless because Lawwell had gone.

He wondered out loud whether the fans who made Peter’s private life a personal hell were seeing the error of their ways.

He told us the one thing you could never say under trophy-laden Peter was that this club was rudderless.

That was eight weeks ago.

Eight.

Now the same keyboard tells us the directorate is slow of thought and lazy in movement.

It is the very same directorate he wanted us to hand back to Peter Lawwell in June.

The directorate that Peter Lawwell hand-picked and trained, right down to Silent Mike himself.

You cannot hold both of those opinions at once and expect anybody to take you seriously.

Well, you can if you’re Hugh Keevins.

Because the position was never really the point.

The narrative was.

Make no mistake, if we go out on Tuesday the tune will change again by next Sunday.

And who do you think will be getting the blame for that?

You watch it happen.

It’ll be the fans who destabilised the club.

Then it’ll be the protests that unsettled the players.

It’ll be anything at all, so long as it isn’t the men in that half-empty box.

That is how this works, and it has worked that way for as long as I’ve been reading him.

So no, I can’t argue with this week’s column.

Not with the ambition, not with the coercion, not with Desmond being somewhere else again.

He’s right about the lot of it.

He’s just about a week behind the people who don’t get paid for it.

Funny how that keeps happening, isn’t it?

Welcome to the party, Shug…

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