Celtic’s Champions League exit: We have to know where we came from to realise where we are!

Our disappointment exiting the Champions League last night was softened by what happened at Celtic Park three weeks ago. Of course in the true Celtic mind and spirit, many of us trotted down to the bookies yesterday to take advantage of some ridiculous bets on offer. Why, well because that’s what we do when living with eternal hope. Me, well I had Celtic to win 2-1 (25/1), 3-1 (100/1) and 4-1 (125/1) okay £6 exited my pocket so I’m back to the Lidl brand of Rice Krispies!

Just to get to the level of the last 16 in the Champions League can take decades of years when building a team more or less from scratch, indeed a last 16 that Manchester City have never dipped their feet into with their gazillions of wealth! There is not a British team left in after ourselves, Chelsea the holders didn’t even make to where we were, and have a glance at Liverpool failing in the Europa Cup.

All clubs mentioned above have swathes of wealth. We operate on pocket money compared to them. Its right at this point where we have to be realistic at where our expectations begin to compete at this level of Champions League football!

Neil Lennon moved in after Tony Mowbray, dismantled his team with haste, did well enough in the Europa Cup last year, has now just to be confirmed as lifting his 2^nd SPL title and has taken us to where we are today on the CL stage. That’s a good place to be. That’s also an excellent place to be when re-building for the next round of Champions League qualifiers beginning on July 16/17.

Yes Victor and Gary have no wish to sign longer improved contracts at the Club. Fine. They’ve been great for us and we deserve to take that extra profit on them - because as much as their own dedication has brought them to a different level, so has the coaching and the CL stage Celtic have provided for them along with the opportunity to mature at a big Club. Let’s be clear here, it’s the SPL they’re wishing to leave. Leaving Celtic is part of that. If Celtic were in the English Premiership they’d be fine staying with Celtic.

Celtic’s recent model of scouring the world for relatively unknown players has been a tremendous success. John Park is the man who heads up that system, and although there have been a few disappointments, the success have easily outweighed the ordinary.

What now for Neil Lennon? The last thing anyone should think, even attempt to do with Neil is to take him for granted. Lennon is Celtic through and through and also gets involved in other Celtic matters off the park that other managers aren’t interested in. He doesn’t do the “We’ll take it on the chin and move on” chat. No, if it matters to Celtic’s welfare, even although it’s outside his remit of being a manager, his Celtic spirit takes over and involved he gets. Doing that brings you extra grief, as does this country’s incessant want to pillory him. That takes its toll and it’s not natural for anyone to be constantly in an ‘under attack’ situation. Although he does handle it remarkably well.

What I think would upset Neil the most is not being backed with his team building plan and the type of player he wishes to bring in to improve and strengthen the squad. That would be paramount to his thinking, because believe it or not, banging your head off a brick wall is not what any manager wishes to do on a regular basis. In saying that Neil is a very clever guy and he realises the financial parameters that Celtic work within. Gone are the days of £6m signings of Sutton, Hartson & Lennon himself.

I’m not despondent in anyway. We’ve punched above our weight at CL level and it’s been an exciting journey of discovery. If the Club are completely in tune with Neil’s ambitions for Celtic then we have plenty to look forward to and more!     

  

    

Fergus flying the Atlantic 19 years ago today with the final piece of the jigsaw!

Discontent amongst Celtic fans was rife and it was getting worse in the early 90s when disgruntled fans were losing all faith in the Celtic Board. No investment, a very poor squad and a crumbling ground with debt getting out of control with the Celtic board at the time not wishing to pay it off. Fans were having meetings, the Shettleson Town Hall being an early venue with ‘Save our Celts’ rallying support. Unfortunately they disbanded, the work required to see this through was unknown, but it was going to have a big effect on peoples’ lives.

There are a thousand stories of grief, laughter, tears, immense commitment, disappointment, arguments, losing hope, constant re-building of motivation, but above all a belief/faith in this ‘Celts for Change’ campaign from people I hadn’t previously encountered before. To this day 19 years on I don’t know where that energy & drive came from. Well, I’m a believer, so maybe we were guided a bit from above?

 I’ll take a hop-skip and jump through events leading to today March 4^th 19 years ago. November 1993 I placed an ad in the paper. It said “If you care about your Club turn up at the City Halls in Glasgow” on a date about 3 days later.

About 30 people turned up. ‘Celts for Change’ was born. Another advert was placed for December 2^nd and the same 50 capacity hall was booked. In between Brendan Sweeney, Davie Cunningham & John Thompson made CFC the initial gang of 4. These were pre-internet days everything was done with leaflets and word of mouth. 500 people were queued up around Candleriggs and onto Argyle Street. My heart was in my mouth and I was cacking it big time.

The concierge quickly arranged a bigger hall for 450 with fans packed in. The energy in the room was dynamic. We had a huge banner which said ‘Back the team, sack the board’. Street campaigning, rallies, leafleting, demonstrations, meetings, more meetings, more of all the above went on spinning on a constant wheel of Celtic emotion.

Moving on-a meeting of around 1,000 fans was held in the Govan Town Hall at the end of 1993, it was partly televised, it was electric, debates from the table to the floor were constant. We were all trying to find a common ground and was heated. Colin Duncan attended all the meetings and sat at the front with his son. The 4 man CFC committee were at breaking point and all under pressure from our families reminding us that they existed also. I asked him aboard to help. Then there were 5.

The leaders of the Celtic Supporters Association of that time 93/94 were totally opposed to us, as were the Affiliation of Celtic Supporters. Both organisations backed the old board to the hilt, comfy seats and all and despite our meetings with their leadership as we went about explaining the critical state of the Club. It all fell on deaf ears. I’ve mentioned ‘leaders’ twice in the above regarding both organisations, because fans from within the above groups started to challenge their leadership to back us. Stand up the Kirkshaw Kangaroos CSC from Coatbridge, they ferociously challenged the Celtic Supporters Association to back us. Official backing never ever came but it did from individual supporters clubs within the CSA overall.     

We visited Dundalk in January 1994 in between constant meetings and rallies around Scotland. We needed their backing. The 5 of us were wilting a bit organising everything, we needed a jag of support. We put our points forward to the delegates from 52 member clubs of the Association of Irish Celtic Supporters groups who had travelled from all over Ireland to the town’s Imperial Hotel. All of us spoke, the bhoys had found their finest hour, and from nothing we were becoming public speakers, albeit the basic type. They were magnificent Davie, Brendan & Colin. John hadn’t made this trip. We got the backing of all 52 member clubs and we were filled with adrenaline to carry the fight on. The Irish Celts had given us the encouragement when we needed it most.

A particular demonstration was held outside the Bank of Scotland Head office on George Square (now the site of the Counting House pub) with about 350 waving banners outside saying ‘Bank of Scotland, stop backing a bankrupt board’. The police were all over the place. Davie & I went into the bank and brazenly asked for the manager. ‘He’s not in said the girl’. Hmmm we replied ‘We think he may be, if we can’t see him the 350 outside will come into the bank and open an account for a £1 then all come back in and close it down’. Banks don’t like chaos. She looked at Davie & I as if we were escapees from the local asylum. Minutes later we were sitting having tea and a custard cream with the second highest guy in the Bank of Scotland.

He listened intently to our case and we were at least pleased with that. Taking another hop, skip and jump we finally convinced the fans to bhoycott the Kilmarnock home game on Tuesday March 1^st 1994. To get to this stage took one helluva effort from the guys. We were all just surviving on adrenaline with our tanks about empty. Moments of laughter were few and far between but at least we were together and from that comes a strength. When their heads were down I tried to lift them. When mine’s was down they did the same.

This Bhoycott had to work. At this critical point we needed victory for all the effort the bhoys had put in. Everyone had a family hanging on in there with us along with thousands of Celts fans who had magnificently stuck with us.

Hugh Pym was the ITN correspondant who covered it (he’s now on the BBC news nightly and a top guy). We called him ‘Pym the Tim’ and he chuckled at it. He was young. One day he said to me “Matt, who handles all your PR? It’s absolutely brilliant”. We were all standing together and we just burst out laughing at the same time. “We do it ourselves big man, the 5 of us” A wee golden moment during a tense time.

Through bucket collections the fans had chipped in, we paid for banners, placards, posters, the hire of halls etc and we just about had enough left to hire a company called ‘Scotsearch’ a market research company. None of us at any point ever had a problem with the fans who went to the game that night. It was their Club and their choice. We pleaded and never demanded. We asked for one game of pain for a world of gain.

Scotsearch had 25 people covering the gates. 8,225 fans attended the game. 1,905 were in the away part of the ground. That meant 6,320 attended the game.

That season Celtic had around 7,000 season ticket holders. Therefore how many people had actually paid into that game?

The Bank of Scotland took notice and ordered the board in & told them £1m had to be paid into Celtic’s account by March 4^th by noon. Chris White, Michael Kelly & David Smith weren’t up for doing that and all three ran for the hills taking what they could from a dying Celtic. I don’t do hate, but for the critical precipice they took Celtic to for their own self-gain, they’ll remain unforgiven!  

Jimmy Farrell, Tom Grant, Kevin Kelly & Jack McGinn stayed in various small background roles for small periods, and although they had been part of the old set-up at least they never pillaged on the way out and kept their shares in the new set-up for a while at least. With another hop, skip & jump it then moved to Fergus who flew across the Atlantic overnight from Scotsdale, Arizona to Glasgow via London between March 3^rd & 4^th.

Make no mistake about it, the bank wanted £1m by noon today 19 years ago and a further £3.5m by the following Tuesday.

Fergus and David Low actually ran down St Vincent’s street from the Clydesdale Bank with money transfer paperwork (pre-internet days) to the Bank of Scotland in 110 St Vincent St at 11.52 with 8 minutes to spare.

We had previously booked the City Halls on Monday March 7^th for another rally but turned it into a victory rally instead. It held 2,500 but easily had 3,000 crammed in with several hundred outside. We had outstanding bills for hall hiring, £500 a pop, posters, banners etc and appealed for a bucket collection. We were about £750 short and Michael McDonald who along with Willie Haughey & Gerald Weisfeld were also interested in taking the Club over but had lost out to Fergus, heard about our shortfall. Michael stepped forward & wrote a cheque to the bank to save the CFC committee from owing the bank at the end of the campaign. That was class.   

There are thousands of trial & tribulations stories during the ‘Celts for Change’ campaign of 1993/94 and the above is at least a flavour of the journey.

‘The game is over the Rebels have won’, rang out from the steps of Celtic Park about 10.30 on that night of March 4^th 1994.

Davie Cunningham, Brendan Sweeney, Colin Duncan & John Thompson all played a magnificent role in ‘Celts for Change’ and without them it just wouldn’t have been possible. From the five of us two relationships hit the skids both heavily linked to the CFC campaign efforts. Three sons have also been brought into the world via those new relationships who wouldn’t have been here today.

Finally, Brendan Sweeney said to me at the end of the campaign “All we need from this campaign is our memories together, when we’re all sitting about when old men thinking about it all” Never a truer word! Hail Hail.  

* Via Twitter today there have been many nice messages posted to my page for all the ‘Celts for Change’ bhoys. They are all very much appreciated and will be passed on. Thank you.   

David Murray’s EBT wide boys & the bungling incompetent SFA!

Thursday was one of those days when you get off to a bad start early on - and the rest of the day generally doesn't get much better, and it didn’t. One of my three sons is up from London and we’re both having a day mountaineering in the Cairngorms. At Queen Street Station I’m trying to buy one of those ‘Grab a bag’ crisps at WH Smith. There is no assistant in sight and I’m faced with one of these robotic check-out machines, can it weigh a 50 gram pack of crisps? No it can’t and the robot tells me to find an assistant.

As I turn around to look for a human - standing there right behind me is the former Conservative Party leader Annabel Goldie, she has the same problem (amongst many others). Over comes a sleepy looking guy and he sorts her out first. Beaten by a Tory wow that was a bad start for me! My train is 11 mins late in leaving and I’ve an 8 min changeover to make at Perth. My education at Lourdes Sen Sec in Glasgow tells me I’m 3 minutes out & I’ll never catch it and will have to wait in Perth for not far off another 2 hours. No I’m not having that!

20 minutes from Perth I ask the Scotrail guy, “I’m catching a connection at Perth to Aviemore, do you think the connecting train will wait a few minutes?” In his finest gruffness he says “Trains don’t wait for people mate”. Okay, I can see I’m dealing with eloquence here and I have to turn up the volume. “Its Scotrail’s fault I’m in this position, therefore can you not radio ahead and ask them to wait for their customers coming off this train”        

He looks like he doesn’t like my question, and my look tells him I have no wish to hang around a frozen Perth station for ages. He does his job and we make it on the connecting train. Result yes. My only one of the day (I even took time to help an aging Canadian lady from Toronto en-route to Inverness with her case. For fox sake I’m asking, how about a bit of karma coming my way now?) I look into Twitter and I notice Chris McLaughlin from the BBC is tweeting that there will be no ‘stripping of titles’ from what was RFC. I’m seriously trying to lift myself after that when I get two tweets within seconds. One from a Rangers fan who says“He hopes I disappear up that mountain” along with a few other scorns on my character. Good wishes ranged from “Don’t jump off when you hear the news Matt” and also from a buddy @mijass in Edinburgh saying “Have a nice day with your lad, you’ll be glad you’re out of it today (Lord Nimmo Smith’s report), but it will be waiting for you when your back)” The weather was poor in the Cairngorms and our trip wasn’t safe to proceed with after 2 hours, so down we came and to one local pub hosted by a few Celts barmen to the good. Therefore here I was in the Cairngorms to give my head a good hoovering in some alpine air with my son I haven’t seen for 6 months and all I’m left with is this Nimmo Smith’s report. 

Therefore down to business and time to go through Lord Nimmo Smith and his two QC’s, Charles Flint & Nicholas Stewart findings. One thing was for sure, these guys will go by every inch of the law, which always comes before the incompetence of others, in this case the Scottish Football Association. Out of their depth is too mild a phrase to use for this organisation. I’ll cut to the chase on the important mechanics of this because it’s the fine detail that undoubtedly matters.

The Commission stated “Rangers FC did not gain any unfair competitive advantage from the contraventions of the SPL rules in failing to make proper disclosure of the side letter arrangements, nor did the non-disclosure have the effect that any of the registered players were ineligible to play and, for this and other reasons, no sporting sanction or penalty should be imposed on Rangers FC”

Okay, so in the above it’s crystal clear. RFC ARE GUILTY OF CONTRAVENING THE SPL RULES.

The commission added “We take the view that the nondisclosure must be regarded as deliberate, in the sense that a decision was taken that the side letters need not be or should not be disclosed. No steps were taken to check, even on a hypothetical basis, the validity of that assumption with the SPL or the SFA.”      

The above paragraph is very important, because what it tells you is that RFC majorly ‘chanced their arm’ here and the SFA in their best Dumb & Dumber act didn’t have a structure in place to insert the word ‘loans’ into their rules. Even although there was a rule about side letters in contracts. The biggest dumb act of the SFA, aided and abetted by the SPL under various chiefs was that RFC did disclose the EBT’s in their annual accounts via their board, a board to which Campbell Ogilvie was a member of, and who approved these statuary accounts. Even although he said these EBT’s were not within the scope of his remit at Rangers. The SFA are where the player registrations are stored after being sent from the SPL. Yet they did not even notice these EBT’s in their accounts throughout all these years. Very peculiar!

The reason RFC got away with this ‘chancing their arms on loans’ is because neither of the above governing body picked it up. And by the time it was brought to their notice - all the prime witness in this investigation Sandy Bryson, the SFA’s Head of Registrations, could say when under questioning, “Was that a player, once registered with the ruling body, remained registered with them until such time as his contract ended or that player left their club’s employment.”

Therefore, even though the absolute details of his contract had been deliberately kept from the SPL, and at the point of registration at the SFA, and or any other breach that had occurred, that registration, once accepted, would stand. Its clear here that the SFA by sheer incompetence screwed up. Nimmo Smith after being in knowledge of that evidence knew fine that if the SFA hadn’t done their work properly then how could he judge against what they themselves had set-up!    

The independent commission therefore went by that slackness, loophole if you want, via the SFA registrations procedure. It was almost as if Nimmo Smith & the 2 QC’s were saying ‘If you guys are too thick to make rules correctly then what do you really expect us to do, they’re your rules!’      

For Rangers part in all this they operated a secret £47m fund that nobody knew about. Yet one look at their accounts showed it there. They were fly and devious and not once did they attempt to ever ask for legal advice on it. They knew the SPL/SFA weren’t the brightest tools in the box and despite what way Nimmo Smith and his two QC’s viewed it or interpreted it, RFC in my and many peoples’ opinion, did gain ‘competitive advantage’ with these loans. They attracted players to Ibrox over the years because of that very fact, players who would never have went near them.

Since the findings, the triumphalism from Ibrox has been sickening. As is the same line from their ex-players. As is their selection box of gimps in the media.

RFC were found guilty on three counts. That’s the verdict and they are as guilty as hell on sporting integrity. Integrity, now there’s a word which they’re finding real difficulty in spelling