Only the Celtic board could conjure up the ability to spend £30 million in a transfer window and still be weaker exiting it…

Yesterday, it emerged that Martin O’Neill asked his players whether the Ibrox side beat them, or whether they beat themselves.

I touched on this in this morning’s article as well, but I feel it warrants further discussion.

Here is what the Celtic manager had to say, speaking on CelticPlayer ahead of tomorrow night’s game:

“I said to the players, I’m not so sure whether Rangers beat us or we beat ourselves in that sense.”

“You’ve got to put the work in, you’ve got to do it and you’ve got to do it every single week.”

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s a home game against somebody who’s at the bottom of the league or away at Ibrox. You’ve just really got to put the work in.”

It’s a good question, and I gave my answer to it in my article this morning.

So let me ask a different one this afternoon, because there is a bigger one sitting behind it.

Are we stronger or weaker than we were before we spent over £30 million this summer?

Because that is the question nobody in the Celtic boardroom wants asked out loud.

Have a look at where that money actually went, because it tells you everything you need to know.

Kasper Høgh, a striker, for something in the region of £11 million.

Haissem Hassan, a right winger for £8.5 million, after weeks of being told he was off to Marseille.

Camilo Duran, a forward, for £3.5 million with add ons.

And finally, Mika Baur and Joel van den Berg for a combined £7.5 million

Do you notice anything at all about that list?

We spent big at the top of the pitch, and left the middle of it completely bare

Because while all of that was going on, our midfield was being dismantled.

Arne Engels was sold for £22 million plus add ons.

Reo Hatate was sold.

And Paolo Bernardo – already a first team midfielder – was allowed to walk out the door before either of them.

And the grand total of midfield reinforcement for all of that was Mika Baur and Joel van den Berg.

A 19 year old rookie from PSV, and a German under-21 from Paderborn.

Nothing against either of these boys, because they may well come good for us in a year or two.

But they are not a replacement for what left, and everybody knows it.

So we have spent a fortune on attacking options, and then removed the very players whose job it was to feed them.

Which is precisely why our attack looks toothless right now.

You cannot service forwards from a midfield that doesn’t function.

Høgh can make all the runs he likes.

If nobody in the middle of the park can find him, those runs are decoration.

That is exactly what we watched for ninety minutes at Ibrox on Sunday afternoon.

The positions that actually mattered were the ones this board decided it could live without

A centre half.

A defensive midfielder.

A left winger.

A left back.

Four positions, every one of them screaming to be addressed since May, and not one of them dealt with.

Instead we went out and bought a fourth and fifth option for the one area of the pitch we were already covered in.

And we ignored the spine of the team completely.

Michael Nicholson had the guts of three months and £30 million to fix all four of them.

Silent Mike instead delivered a window that looks great on a spreadsheet and terrible on a pitch.

Twenty one players left the club over the course of the summer.

We banked a profit of close to £20 million.

Somewhere in Barbados, the absent meddling golfer is telling himself that this was outstanding business.

Who is going to tell him otherwise?

Only this board could lay out £30 million and hand the manager a weaker squad than he had in May

Think about how hard that actually is to do.

Spending money and getting worse takes a special kind of incompetence.

Most clubs manage to improve by accident when they spend that sort of cash.

Not us, though.

At Celtic, we have turned it into a strategy.

Buy where it’s cheap and marketable, sell where it hurts, and call the difference success.

The football operation comes second to the balance sheet, as it always has.

And the support pays for it, as we always do.

So when Martin O’Neill stands there and asks whether we beat ourselves at Ibrox?

There’s a fair bit of truth in that.

But it wasn’t only the eleven men on that pitch who beat us, was it?

You can send an army out to battle, but not with the weapons this board handed over

Because if you do that, you are asking for trouble.

And trouble duly arrived on Sunday afternoon, three goals of it.

The men who chose not to buy a defensive midfielder do not get to sit above this one.

They built this problem in June, July and August, long before a ball was kicked at Ibrox.

The players simply lived it out in front of 50,000 of them on Sunday.

Having said all of that, I’m not letting the manager away with it either.

Like I said this morning, most of us knew we were beaten the moment the team sheet appeared.

And the team doesn’t select itself.

Martin O’Neill has to shoulder a fair portion of the blame for Sunday’s capitulation, and I think he knows that.

The board handed him inadequate weapons for the battle he was being sent into.

He then chose to send out the wrong soldiers with them.

Both of those things can be true at the very same time, and in this case they are.

So yes, we beat ourselves at Ibrox.

But we started beating ourselves back in the summer, in a boardroom, with a chequebook.

£30 million spent, and a weaker team coming out of the window than the one that went into it.

Only at Celtic…

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