Be prepared for the wrath of Desmond, he has determined Celtic fans will pay, and vengeance will be his….

Yesterday morning, I wrote about the God King’s late-night meltdown, and I thought that might be the end of it for a while.

Then the Celtic Fans Collective put out their own response yesterday afternoon, and I read it twice.

Because the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this is not the end of anything.

It’s the opening act.

Here is what the Collective had to say, in part:

In yet another rash late-night statement, Celtic Football Club, almost certainly at the behest of minority shareholder Dermot Desmond, sought to attack the Celtic Fans Collective. Similar interventions in recent years have tended to appear whenever the notoriously thin-skinned Desmond feels personally slighted.

They are not wrong.

Think about it for a second.

Disastrous transfer windows have come and gone, and we have had no statement.

Failed managerial appointments, no statement.

Supporters attacked and kettled by the police, no statement.

Humiliating nights on the park that have done real damage to the name of this club, and still not a peep.

But a few tennis balls land at St Andrews on a Saturday afternoon, and by the end of the night the club is typing furiously.

When did the board last move this quickly for the supporters?

I’ll answer that for you.

Never.

I can’t recall a single occasion in all my years watching this club where the board showed this kind of urgency over something that actually mattered to the people who fill the stadium every other week.

The Collective says as much, and it is hard to disagree:

This tells Celtic supporters everything they need to know about Dermot Desmond and his priorities. He appears furious that ordinary working-class fans have dared to air their grievances in the safe, elitist world of golf, embarrassing him in front of the network of people whose opinions he appears to value far more than those of Celtic supporters.

That line about the golf course is the one that will have stung him.

Not the tennis balls.

The audience.

It’s one thing to be criticised by the support, which he has shrugged off for years from a very comfortable distance.

It’s quite another to be criticised in front of the people he actually wants to impress.

Make no mistake, a man like this does not forgive, and he certainly does not forget.

So here is where I think this goes, and I’ll happily be proved wrong.

The absent meddling golfer now believes that he has been disrespected, publicly, by a group of working-class Celtic fans.

He has already shown us how he reacts to that, with an 867 word statement written in the heat of the moment.

Now imagine what he does when he has had a few days to think about it.

And this is a man who has all the time in the world, and all the money to go with it.

Now, I’m not saying there will be a grand plan.

But you know how this board operates, and you know how the support gets punished.

Well, it won’t come in the form of a statement.

It will come in the transfer window, where the money mysteriously dries up again.

It will come in the ticket prices, and the season book renewals, and the next piece of small print that nobody asked for.

It will come in the quiet, and it will be dressed up as ‘financial prudence’.

Is that paranoia?

Maybe.

Then again, who among us thought this club would be in the state it is in now, when we were told that everything was under control?

If he thinks threats and bluster will silence the support, he is sadly mistaken.

The Collective closed their statement with a warning of their own, that if Desmond believes threats and bluster will silence opposition and let him return to presiding over Celtic’s decline from the golf course, he is sadly mistaken.

I agree with every word of that.

Because the thing he does not seem to grasp is that every time he lashes out, he hands the support another reason to keep going.

Every late-night statement is another recruiting poster.

Every attempt to paint a group of fans as the problem only proves their point about where the real problem sits.

They have said that more communication is coming this week, and that a full update will go out to members.

I am one of them, so I’ll be reading it closely.

The support has a long memory too, and we are not going anywhere.

Let him come with whatever he has.

He can bide his time, he can sulk on the fairway, and he can send out as many midnight statements as he likes.

We have seen it all before, and we will see it all again.

The difference this time is that the support has had enough of being told to sit down and be grateful.

Hearts at home is only the start.

He wants Celtic fans to pay for daring to speak up?

Fine.

We’ll pay in noise, in numbers and in patience that is now well and truly spent.

Vengeance might be his, Dermot.

BUT SO IS THE CONSEQUENCE…

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