With £100 million in the bank, how do you conspire to make a coach who has won 1 major trophy in 19 years look good? Ask the Celtic board how they turned Derek McInnes into a master tactician

Yesterday evening, Derek McInnes was the first man off the team bus at Ibrox.

He punched the air, and the crowd that had gathered on Copland Road roared straight back at him.

Fireworks, flares, the full works.

You can watch the whole thing back in the Scottish Sun if your stomach is stronger than mine.

And do you know the worst part of it?

He has earned every second of that reception.

Six straight wins now, two Glasgow derbies inside a week, and our lead at the top of the league cut to two points.

A 3-0 at Ibrox last Sunday, and a 1-0 at Celtic Park yesterday through Ryan Naderi.

Sixty thousand of us in the ground for that one, and not one of them went home with anything.

So let me ask the question nobody in our boardroom will be asking themselves this morning.

How exactly do you take a coach with one major trophy in nineteen years and turn him into a master tactician?

Because that is what has happened here.

And it has not happened because of anything Derek McInnes has done.

It has happened because of what this board has done to us.

Look, I’ll be fair to the man – he set his side up to counter us, and it worked perfectly.

Credit where it is due for that.

But here is the thing that should be keeping Michael Nicholson awake.

Any coach with a basic understanding of how you set a team up could have countered Celtic yesterday.

Any of them.

You would not have needed nineteen years in the game, or a laptop, or a single minute of video analysis.

You would have needed eyes.

And is that not the most damning thing anyone can say about a Celtic team?

Our football yesterday was so amateur it made public park football look like a coaching manual

I have watched a lot of bad Celtic performances in my time.

I have never watched one where there was so little evidence of a plan.

Martin O’Neill changed the shape more times than I could keep count of.

And after every single change, we arrived at the same conclusion.

Hoof it.

Up it went, again and again, into a sky full of Ibrox defenders who could not believe their luck.

All they had to do was stand there and watch it descending.

Then they headed it back from whence it came.

And we did it again.

That’s not tactics.

That is not a formation.

That is a group of players with no idea what they are supposed to be doing, hoping something turns up.

And whose job is it to tell them what they are supposed to be doing?

Nobody at our club seems to have the first clue how to get the best out of the players we do have available.

The side that supposedly outfoxed us went out of Europe to a Czech pub team three weeks ago

Let us not lose the run of ourselves about what beat us yesterday.

Derek McInnes and his Ibrox side are not a great team.

Jablonec told us that, and they told us in front of the whole of Scotland.

They have spent the guts of £35 million and they cannot get out of a Conference League qualifier.

Their own support had written this manager off in August.

They were queuing up to tell anyone who would listen that he was a dead man walking.

Now they are lighting fireworks for him on Copland Road.

We did that.

Nobody else did that.

We turned a man the klanbase wanted sacked four weeks ago into the best coach in the country, and we did it in seven days flat.

And in the coming days those same accounts are expected to show us sitting on around £100 million

That is the bit that should genuinely enrage you.

It is not that we are poor.

It is that we are poor and loaded at the same time.

How do you manage that?

We have the money to fix the midfield, and we chose not to.

We have the money to give any manager a squad capable of more than launching it, and we chose not to.

Then we stood back and let the coaching staff take the bullets for a squad the board deliberately left short.

Of course, not a word will be said about any of it.

Silent Mike will stay silent, Dermot Desmond will stay wherever he is, and the statement will never come.

Because it never does.

When was the last time anyone at Celtic stood up and owned a single one of these days and nights?

They will let Martin O’Neill wear this one, the same way they have let every manager wear every one before it.

Make no mistake, this is not a bad run of form, this is a rudderless club drifting wherever the tide takes it

There is nobody steering it.

There’s no plan on the pitch and there is no plan above it.

There is just money in a bank account and a support being asked to be patient.

And while all that goes on, a coach who has won one major honour since 2007 gets carried back into Ibrox like Rinus Michels.

We made that man.

We made him look like a genius, and we did it with a hundred million quid sitting in the bank.

A hundred million pounds, and the best tactical brain in Scottish football this week belongs to Derek McInnes.

Read that back to yourself one more time.

Amateurs!

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