You have to go back to the days of John Barnes and Kenny Dalglish to find the last time Celtic lost eight games in a league season. They have lost more games now than Hearts and Rangers combined and more than either Motherwell and Hibernian. Of the four teams, only Hibs have a poorer goal difference.
Celtic manager Martin O’Neill’s first defeat to Dundee United must have felt like a personal affront. It was the very antithesis of the physical strength, courage and guile of his Parkhead glory years when he went to the well with players like Henrik Larsson, Chris Sutton and Bobo Balde.
The current lot are gutless, mentally and physically weak, and devoid of endeavour or physicality in key departments. They were bullied and outplayed by a Dundee United side with little or no chance of reaching the top six, and finished the game shapeless and all over the place. At no point did they look likely to stage a fightback or score a goal.
Sutton described United as “streetwise” and while a possession figure of 26 per cent suggested they should have been nowhere near it, they were comfortable winners. Celtic passed the ball from side to side and backwards all day and offered no sustained threat in the final third.
The home team had 19 shots on goal to their opponents’ 13. They mustered eight on target to Celtic’s three and had more touches in the opposition box. While the pitch played like the dark side of the moon after a violent sand storm, that was the case for both teams. There should be no excuses for Celtic’s witless display. Both teams finished with what they deserved.
When six minutes of added time went up, United manager Jim Goodwin must have harboured some anxiety. Last weekend they were two clear of their city rivals Dundee as they started stoppage time and still contrived to throw two points away.
There was no risk of that here, no question of one of those trademark late comebacks from a team in green-and-white playing slow, ponderous, unimaginative football. United’s defending was excellent, their handling of the conditions superior.
The most damning aspect of the day for Celtic was a post-match interview where United’s opening goal scorer Will Ferry attributed victory to his side wanting it more and being more aggressive.
Back-to-back home wins over Celtic are as rare as snow in August and there was no blaming former boss Wilfried Nancy for this one. Trailing Hearts by five points and Rangers by two, Celtic can’t afford to be out fought, let alone out thought.
In recent games they have been papering over the cracks. On a day when the roof finally caved in, the substitutions contrived to make things worse. In the first half, Reo Hatate looked more like the player of old, passing the ball crisply and sharply, and a decision to move the Japanese midfielder to right-back in response to Colby Donovan’s injury was a strange business.
While the SPFL should be having a word with Dundee United over a pitch as dry, rutted and inhospitable as the Gobi Desert, that is no excuse for Celtic’s challenge breathing through an oxygen mask on a life support machine.
That is on the men upstairs, one in particular. Celtic have squandered their huge financial advantage by making a mess of the structure and model in the complacent belief that they could carry on getting away with it by pinning the blame on former manager Brendan Rodgers.
While injuries to key players Jota, Cameron Carter-Vickers and Alistair Johnston have clearly had a detrimental impact on the starting XI, much of the damage is self inflicted. Complacency, the sale of important goal scorers, the arrival of mediocre replacements, the appointments of Paul Tisdale as head of football operations, and Nancy, and a refusal to swing and miss has created a Celtic team straight out of 1994.
Wayne Biggins and Stuart Slater could barely have looked any less menacing than their attacking options did yesterday. Failure to spend on a consistent, dependable goal-scoring striker has left O’Neill chopping and changing up front, throwing jelly at the wall, hoping something sticks.
Celtic are winding the clock back to the 1990s off the pitch as well. The distance between supporters and the board of directors feels like a throwback to the days when the tactical nous of Celts for Change ended with Fergus McCann sweeping the old ruling families from office in March ’94.
The same tactics cut no ice with the current controlling shareholder Dermot Desmond. The Green Brigade, the Celtic Fans Collective and the “Not Another Penny” campaign seem to exert no influence on an Irish billionaire who would rather take his own counsel and shows no sign of going anywhere.
Desmond was nowhere to be seen when his placemen were taking pelters at the final whistle at Tannadice. Living in Dublin has its upside and, in contrast with the Kellys, the Whites and the Grants, the Desmonds can comfortably put some distance between themselves and events in Glasgow.
Wilson, Nicholson and McKay can’t say the same and all three must now be asking themselves how long they can carry on like this, carrying the can for the owner in absentia.
Chants of “Sack the Board” overlook the fact that Celtic don’t appear to have a board with any real clout or influence. So long as they are drawn from the same narrow pool of educational establishments and put up with being used as human pinatas for a controlling shareholder accountable to no one but himself, they can carry on watching games from the padded seats. Until everything changes, nothing changes at all.
Celtic have owned up publicly to mistakes, resolving to fix the club’s governance issues. The last interim figures showed that revenue was down while profits fell from £43.9 million to £13.2m. All of this while they sit on a cash mountain of £67m and field a team facing the prospect of surrendering the league to a Hearts team assembled for a fraction of the cost. Or a Rangers side assembled via the radical policy of spending significant sums of money on players.
A third-place finish might do Celtic a bit of good. Already searching for a new manager, a new head of recruitment and a dozen new players, the summer offers no guarantee of a rapid change of fortunes if they carry on running the club the way they have recently.