Well, we warned you...
Allow your club to be quasi-owned by #####################################, with a ######################################## businessman as chief executive, an extraordinary renditioning self-interested warmonger as chairperson, an inept manager whose former team, in Reality, would have finished trailed off at the bottom of last years' Premier League had it not been for the handicapping of the competition, and a club agent who combines professional deficiencies with rather too much interest in the betting markets, and this is what you get...
Celtic 0 Dinamo Moskva 1.
In 31 home games over seven seasons, only Barcelona have won at Parkhead until last night - Juventus, Bayern Munchen, Milan, Manchester United, Lyon, Valencia, Barcelona and Liverpool have all failed (sometimes more than once) - but the defeat didn't just appear out of the blue.
In this post, we list the organisational and individual irregularities and shortcomings that have resulted in another £10 million or so disappearing down the drain of the Desmondocracy.
It wasn't just the defeat last night.
It was the manner of the defeat.
The team selection was curious, the substitutions pre-programmed, the tactics were wrong throughout the match, while the decision to turn down television money in order to railroad fans down to the stadium was unusual, to say the least - the Celtic match was the only Champions League 3rd Qualifying Round Tie whose tv rights remained unsold.
The planning was tawdry.
The Dinamo match was the most important match in the window.
The timetabling of entry into the ludicrous Wembley Cup was short-termist money-grabbing.
The team needed to be match fit for the Dinamo tie and, for several reasons, they weren't.
Having your entire squad play 90 minutes on either the Friday and Sunday prior to the match while spending four days away from home in a hotel!
Not even getting a competitive match out of the charade, Al-Ahly were poor and Tottenham were betting ######################################################
################################################################# - witness the Spurs turnaround victory against West Ham in Beijing yesterday!!
Furthermore, these fake results and the fake trophy gave the squad an undeserved boost to their feelgood factors, introducing a complacency into the psychological build-up!!!
The summer transfers are entirely uninspiring - that is the problem with utilising an inadequate club agent.
The manner in which Lennon nutmegged Danny Fox at Wembley showed why Coventry fans were delighted with the transfer fee, while Marc-Antoine Fortune is looking like he might evolve into one of Colquhoun's special forward disasters.
Think Bobby Zamora.
The betting market on the match was fascinating.
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And the desire to be immersed in a flood of money is the fundamental template at Parkhead.
Napoleonic John Reid, a small man with a complex complex - "perhaps if I facilitate torture they might take me seriously?" - converting government largesse into private consultancies; Lie-well and Colquhoun negotiating the terms of the sale of Boruc to Liverpool, in return for Scott Carson, whose agent just happens to be Colquhoun, immediately after the Barcelona defeat 17 months ago; the money sloshing backwards and forwards over the Mowbray appointment (with associated player transfers) reaches a level of 'nepotistic' mutual benefitship as slices of the action oscillate between the same people, always wearing different hats, of course.
And the approach to transfers is all based on simplicity and pseudo-science.
There is no analytical rigour of any robustness underpinning the selection or evaluation of players nor, indeed, managers.
Fake mathematics with highly subjective input is not cutting edge in our sabermetric world.
The Celtic transfer strategy does not even warrant the word 'strategy'.
For instance, one of Colquhoun's goldmine 'strategies' is that there is a scarcity of left-sided defenders hence, as an agent, one is able to cash in on this supply-demand discrepancy.
That is state-of-the-art, apparently.
Celtic will continue to underperform on the field of play while the power struggle continues to destabilise the hierarchy - the Wembley Cup fiasco and the tv rights to last night's game are hardly suggestive of solid financial planning.
Too much focus on their personal fiefdoms...
And what about the fans, those people who were coerced into the stadium to witness the debacle, and those around the world who were denied visual access to the match, where do we stand in all this?
Whichever power base wins the Celtic boardroom battle, it is disastrous for fans, as both camps are patently unsuitable to the management of a club that aspires to European Super League status.
Celtic are Hull City.
Celtic are West Bromwich Albion.
And its getting worse.
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