Bill Leckie is right about the arrogance at Celtic, he’s just looking at the wrong floor of the building

Bill Leckie reckons too many of our big names were way too arrogant to graft when the going got tough at Ibrox yesterday.

And I’m afraid he has got a point.

It sticks in the throat to type that, because it isn’t often you’ll catch me agreeing with a word the Scottish Sun prints about our club.

But there was no arguing with what we all sat and watched yesterday afternoon.

Here is what Leckie had to say about it:

And on an afternoon when their fans must have ended up thanking the SPFL for banning them from sitting through it in person, way too many big names once again proved themselves way too arrogant to dig in and graft for a result when the going got tough.

He’s not wrong, is he?

The thing is, arrogance like that doesn’t just appear out of nowhere on a Sunday afternoon.

It gets learned.

The arrogance Leckie is talking about doesn’t start on the pitch, it starts a few floors above it.

Our board have spent years operating on one simple assumption, that we can lord it over everybody in this country whenever we feel like it.

Spend the bare minimum, bank the profit, and the league flag will look after itself.

That was the model, and for a long time it worked – mainly because the Ibrox side kept handing it to us on a plate every single season.

Well, it isn’t working now.

Yesterday it got taken apart in front of a full house, with not one of ours allowed through the door to see it.

And to a degree, Wednesday night in Perth was telling us the very same story three days earlier.

St. Johnstone tested us, and we needed Sam Johnstone to keep us in that game at all.

We all know what it means when a newly promoted side can look us in the eye for ninety minutes.

Derek McInnes didn’t have to be a tactical genius yesterday, he just had to want it more than we did.

There was nothing revolutionary about any of it.

Three at the back, smother our midfield, go man to man where it hurt, and get the ball up to two big men as early and as often as possible.

That’s it.

That is the masterplan that put us out of a cup competition.

What McInnes actually got from his players was an attitude, and attitude isn’t something you can sign in the last 36 hours of a window.

We stood off them.

We never matched them up, never went two up top, and never once went after a second ball.

Callum McGregor was caught on camera at 3-0 down telling his defence ‘nae mair goals’.

When your captain’s ambition has been reduced to damage limitation, the game is long gone.

And in truth, it could have been five.

Kevin Kelsy missed an open goal four minutes in after Sam Johnstone passed the ball straight to him.

Nico Raskin went half a yard early with a header he thought was a third.

Emmanuel Fernandez missed a couple of free ones with his head.

So let’s not kid ourselves that 3-0 flattered anybody other than us.

If anything, we got off lightly, and that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d type about a game at Ibrox.

Last season we sailed far too close to the wind, and yesterday was the bill for it landing on the mat.

None of this should be a shock to anybody who was actually paying attention.

We got away with it for months because the competition was hopeless and our luck held.

Then Linz happened.

And since Linz there has been radio silence from the boardroom – Silent Mike doing what Silent Mike does best – because there is nothing they can say that doesn’t incriminate them.

If lessons genuinely cannot be learned from all of that, and it’s arrogance stopping the board from learning them, then it tells you exactly how out of touch these people are.

Yesterday also showed us how badly out of touch our 74 year old manager is.

Martin O’Neill sat in that technical area and changed nothing for ninety minutes.

Not the shape, not the personnel, not the approach.

The board’s naivety in assuming he could simply do last season all over again could yet be the thing that finishes this campaign off.

Because a repeat was never a plan.

It was a hope, and hope has never been a strategy.

So the question now is whether there is anybody inside Celtic Park capable of steering us out of this.

The SMSM are having an absolute field day this morning, and we handed them every last bullet.

For once they didn’t need to invent a thing, which must make a lovely change for them – they usually have to work so hard at it.

And the dynamic of next Sunday at Celtic Park has changed completely.

They know how to stop us now.

Worse than that, they know they can beat us.

So, do we have the people within the walls of our club to navigate us out of the storm?

A 74 year old manager who couldn’t read a game he had been warned about all week?

Silent Mike, saying nothing about anything, as per usual?

An absent meddling golfer signing it all off from a distance?

The sad reality is that we do not.

We thought we could outsmart the storm.

Now we’re in the middle of it, and nobody on the bridge can find the wheel…

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