I hereby promise, (after this paragraph), on pain of drinking alcohol-free lager, to refrain for evermore in addressing the events, endured along with everyone else here, of the balls-up in Bratislava, the misery that was Motherwell, and without wanting to go overboard about the horror that we found ourselves embroiled in on Saturday in hell’s kitchen, I think that we can fairly say that it has stoked the fires of those who would wish us ill!
It’s the coming weeks, months and years that matter, and there are only two things which will have an influence on the fruits which we will harvest.
Firstly knowing what the vision is for the team, the style, the supporters and every variegated piece of jigsaw that forms and drives our club.
Secondly we must pick the ingredients and the recipe which will cook and blend with a little bit more paprika there, or turmeric here, a touch of salt and a sprinkling of magic dust formed from that marvellous diaspora of historic necessity, willpower, stubbornness and romantic imagination.
It is in this way that we will create a team not only fit to wear but deliberately fashioned to wear with pride ‘the shirt that does not shrink……’!, simmering and boiling with an intensity and quality which realises that vision in dramatic and multi-cultural flavours of outrageous imagination and skill.
And the main ingredients of that recipe are simply an unrelenting ambition, a hunger to succeed, and a total refusal to accept defeat.
We need once more the essence of the heroes of the past to whom we may very well have been a football club, but a football club with a greater calling and a responsibility which was not a burden but a motivation in bad times and a justification in good days!
It is in the exact circumstances facing us now that the giants of the past strode the sands of time and left their indelible footprints for us not only to marvel but to dare to follow ‘on the one road, sharing the one load, we're on the road to God knows where, we're on the one road, maybe the wrong road, but we're together now who cares………..’.
Willie Maley, Jimmy Quinn, Jimmy McGrory, Robert Kelly, Jock Stein, Billy McNeil!
It doesn’t matter if you agreed with them or not, these were characters many of whom were hewn from the rocks of abject poverty. When it came to being in the vanguard of a fight for what they believed in and what they felt was of value, these men would lead those who at times didn’t even recognise the need, towards a future of hope.
Nothing could knock them off their chosen path and in times of adversity, the hope they instilled, realised or not, was in itself spiritually inspirational in its simplicity and honesty.
Read about them, but don’t weep that we have no-one of their calibre around now, for I believe that we just might have!
Men such as these are master craftsmen and while it is only when the work of art is finished that we can fully enjoy its being, we can also revel in the delights of watching him at work as he sets out his tools, selects his ingredients, and the way he moulds, and chips, and sculpts to create a reflection of his dream.
Through the mists of disappointment I see a shape manifesting itself in the early stages of fast accurate passing from back to front, supported by midfield thrusts of the unexpected, attacking left, attacking right, attacking through the middle, all built on a foundation of versatility, determination and the will to win!
Are we stuttering? Darn tootin’ we are!
Does that make the vision wrong? No way.
Do we need to allow the ingredients to blend? Of course we do!
Do we need to replace some ingredients? Probably!
Do we change the recipe? NO!
We are not going to be served with the score-line centric overpriced, fat-filled burger with a fast hit of artificially satisfying stimulants and e-numbers.
Our fare is that of not necessarily the finest ingredients, but definitely of those which have been selected and prepared individually, and then added to the mix at the right time in the right place.
This will be a feast not of the production line, but of the master chef in the finest of kitchens with a twinkle in his eye and the essence of magic dust at his finger tips which Midas like will once more return the gold standard of association football to its rightful home and its rightful owners!
I believe that Gordon Strachan is that master chef.
We all need to support him in his vision.
Even more we all need him to be our hero!
We’re all getting hungry Gordon so…..
Ready! Steady! Cook!
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Friday, August 12, 2005
E=MCsquared or does it?
In the dim distant recesses of my mind there lurks a late 1960’s echo of those dreary day-dreaming periods in the chalk-dust shrouded mathematics class at St Pat’s, Coatbridge. It was during these moments of enforced mental and physical penance that it was drummed into my karma and forcibly memorised catechism-like in rote fashion, and repeated in a pavlovian inspired survival fashion as a preventative of a sudden encounter with a flying blackboard duster, that ……the figures don’t lie!
In the cataclysmic event that we forgot, ignored, or played fast and loose with this 11th Commandment, old ‘Chung’, our not-quite affectionate handle for our culturally destitute mathematics inquisitor who had the appearance of a badly deformed tumchy and the sensitivity of a flatulent cadaver, would often gave us a little present.
The present in this case was a never to be forgotten cherished memory of the skin-ripping state approved birching with a two foot length of regularly exercised, vinegar dipped, forked tongued, leather harbinger of institutionally approved barbarism – the belt.
As an aside (as if most of this verbage that I write has any relevance to God, Life, and Celtic) his generosity with these presents must have had Andrew Carnegie spinning in jealousy.
With a logic that defied that of a low intelligence tumour, he would not only bestow this gift upon ‘he who transgressed’ but would also shower, with a great deal of feigned reluctance, an equal present upon everyone else, boy or girl, in the class , with the hilarious character forming justification that all our parents would be up in arms if they thought that one pupil was favoured with a present while everyone else was left wanting!
‘Civilised my erse’, though admittedly to us young braves of the teenage revolution of the enlightened sixties, much more preferable than a hundred lines and being kept in!
This was my first introduction to the Marxist concept of collective responsibility. If wan got it wrang we all paid!
And we never cried!
Ah the marvels of a Catholic schooling! A mix of ten commandments, Christian love, sadistic child haters, all flavoured with an atmosphere of black burning shame and guilt.
Anyway even in the midst of the probable perverted pleasure that he (and many other pillars of the mortar board society) wallowed in, like all coins of life there were two sides, and to mix metaphors the silver lining was that even now I am wary of a flying duster taking a hairy lump out of my head.
I still chant that maxim – the figures never lie!
How we interpret them may!
The causes for them being as they are may also be shrouded in questions!
Even their extrapolation into the future state of the nation may be up for grabs!
But the bare facts of how much was invested, how much was spent on wages, transfers, loans, debts etc etc are there for all to see.
Some of the arguments on here don’t seem to recognise this simple truth. The audited accounts are in fact our club’s revealed truth.
You are entitled to treat them as a blanket of obfuscation knitted by a cabal of hand-wringing Walter Mittys who run board meetings based upon the evil intentions of Dr Strangelove.
However, if your beef is rooted in the mythical reality of Hogwarts and you don’t believe the P&L, the debits and credits, or the balance sheet then there is really no discussion to be had unless it is around how Celtic Football Club is another Enron or WorldCom in the making.
The way that some on here argue with basic facts without demonstrating an understanding for instance of the essential difference between buying shares (the money goes to the previous shareholder) and underwriting a rights or additional share issue (the money goes to the institution i.e Celtic), totally undermines any case of commenting on the financial position and history of how we got here, where we came from, and most importantly the financial options that lie ahead of us!
You can shout it through a megaphone, you can put it in capitals, italics, big letters, ariel, times new roman, or surround the words with marching friggen ants. It doesn’t matter how often you say that we didn’t invest after Seville and that the board didn’t back MON.!
Yes we did! Yes they did!
The figures don’t lie!
For God’s sake read them!
Now you may want us to have invested more and risked more, and oh goodness gracious me, I may even agree with you, but (and I accept that hindsight is a marvellous skill) I really wish that all those millions we did invest in enhancing current contracts (cos that’s where it went) had proved to be more effective. I can see a lot of areas which might have made that investment give us a much better football return, but for the life of me I can’t see how I can blame the board!
Believe me, I want to blame someone and I really don’t fancy the bone-begging options that currently are sitting with their paws in the air just now!
That would be a sacrilege!
So I think I will consign it to the jigsaw of history that someone else can put together!
I am pretty sure that all of you who disagree with Paul on the meaning and his analysis of the accounts are not only wrong but should have a fearful glance over their shoulder to make sure that the erstwhile and totally unbeloved ‘Chung’ of my nightmares has indeed shed his mortal coil and is not bearing down upon you, nostrils flaring, gown flapping like an avenging black angel of death, with nuclear duster about to be launched in the direction of the nearest unprotected acne ridden head!
Hopefully he can now do no more than watch in ever mounting unrequited anger from whatever big classroom in the sky or more probably and (may God forgive me) hopefully ‘below’, he now peddles his reign of terror.
We are now at the dawn of a new era and one that I believe promises, (a phrase that both Paul67 and James Forest have used on the unique CelticQuickNews site), a New Celtic.
Well NEW at least to those of you who didn’t have the life enriching experience of the stagnant late fifties and early sixties being suddenly nourished into an era of unbridled success through an injection of skill, style, ambition, and vision of as Carlsberg didn’t say ‘ Carlsberg don’t do Nine in a rows but if we did………..’.
So for me if you’ll pardon the plagiarism it is simply ‘Back to the Future’.
We want a team that excites through not just victories but with a swagger, a gallusness, and a natural élan that is not just a surface mirage but is at the heart and soul of every fibre of our being.
We want to go to games with an expectation of highs and lows of a team that front foot, back, foot, left foot, right foot, head arms and legs gives everything so that when we get back to the pub, home, garden, cardboard box, or doorway, all we want to do is re-live every moment every move, shot, tackle and goal that was served up before us.
We also want the regular pleasure of sticking it right up those charlatans from down Govan way.
It has started.
As of today I believe we will regularly invest in refreshing the team with able and motivated players.
We will also do this in a way that maintains our debt or our profit at a level which satisfies the bankers and the investors.
And why will all this happen?
Well the ingredients of a fast-flowing entertaining team are there. As the season moves on, the season tickets that have not been taken up will not matter a jot, because the available tickets will be bought by non-season ticket holders who want to see the re-birth of a dream.
Nakamura, Zurawski, Beattie, Maloney, Lawson, Kennedy, Boruc, Marshall, Gardyne, O’Dea, Quinn, Mcgeady, Wallace, Petrov.
These are our future.
The world will want to be part of this phenomenon, this most beautiful of teams which play the most beautiful of games.
See in that moment just before you drift off from consciousness to the land of dreams, a million Green and White scarves circling the world! White faces, yellow faces, black faces, and brown faces, every accent you can imagine all led by the raucous passion of a Scottish heart and the lilting eloquence of an Irish soul.
Our team, our club, our being will never be made real by a financial plan and big bank account. The truth is the other way around. Get that bit of magic into the team, into the support and into the management and the accounts will take care of themselves.
Invest your faith in them and invest it and your support in Gordon Strachan. It will be repaid in diamond nights and golden days!
Remember that first MON season.. Remember that treble. Remember that day against St Mirren and Tommy Johnston’s cack-footed goal.
Remember the East End of Glasgow that day, which even the astonishing pilgrimage of Seville could not match in intensity.
Oh you don’t believe me!
Go on! Make an effort because I would much rather go forward with the belief that it will happen and then be disappointed and then believe again, rather than live in a dark dungeon of permanent misery and fear.
When I sing and shout, when I cheer and embrace, when I look around all those green and white crystal balls of certainty who inhabit the seats of the Celtic end and who sing from beginning to end, that’s what I feel and reach out with unfailing optimism and expectation to grasp!.
That will do me!
Keep disputing, keep arguing, but……..
I know that not one of you will ever forget the dream!
See you against the Bairns tomorrow!
In the cataclysmic event that we forgot, ignored, or played fast and loose with this 11th Commandment, old ‘Chung’, our not-quite affectionate handle for our culturally destitute mathematics inquisitor who had the appearance of a badly deformed tumchy and the sensitivity of a flatulent cadaver, would often gave us a little present.
The present in this case was a never to be forgotten cherished memory of the skin-ripping state approved birching with a two foot length of regularly exercised, vinegar dipped, forked tongued, leather harbinger of institutionally approved barbarism – the belt.
As an aside (as if most of this verbage that I write has any relevance to God, Life, and Celtic) his generosity with these presents must have had Andrew Carnegie spinning in jealousy.
With a logic that defied that of a low intelligence tumour, he would not only bestow this gift upon ‘he who transgressed’ but would also shower, with a great deal of feigned reluctance, an equal present upon everyone else, boy or girl, in the class , with the hilarious character forming justification that all our parents would be up in arms if they thought that one pupil was favoured with a present while everyone else was left wanting!
‘Civilised my erse’, though admittedly to us young braves of the teenage revolution of the enlightened sixties, much more preferable than a hundred lines and being kept in!
This was my first introduction to the Marxist concept of collective responsibility. If wan got it wrang we all paid!
And we never cried!
Ah the marvels of a Catholic schooling! A mix of ten commandments, Christian love, sadistic child haters, all flavoured with an atmosphere of black burning shame and guilt.
Anyway even in the midst of the probable perverted pleasure that he (and many other pillars of the mortar board society) wallowed in, like all coins of life there were two sides, and to mix metaphors the silver lining was that even now I am wary of a flying duster taking a hairy lump out of my head.
I still chant that maxim – the figures never lie!
How we interpret them may!
The causes for them being as they are may also be shrouded in questions!
Even their extrapolation into the future state of the nation may be up for grabs!
But the bare facts of how much was invested, how much was spent on wages, transfers, loans, debts etc etc are there for all to see.
Some of the arguments on here don’t seem to recognise this simple truth. The audited accounts are in fact our club’s revealed truth.
You are entitled to treat them as a blanket of obfuscation knitted by a cabal of hand-wringing Walter Mittys who run board meetings based upon the evil intentions of Dr Strangelove.
However, if your beef is rooted in the mythical reality of Hogwarts and you don’t believe the P&L, the debits and credits, or the balance sheet then there is really no discussion to be had unless it is around how Celtic Football Club is another Enron or WorldCom in the making.
The way that some on here argue with basic facts without demonstrating an understanding for instance of the essential difference between buying shares (the money goes to the previous shareholder) and underwriting a rights or additional share issue (the money goes to the institution i.e Celtic), totally undermines any case of commenting on the financial position and history of how we got here, where we came from, and most importantly the financial options that lie ahead of us!
You can shout it through a megaphone, you can put it in capitals, italics, big letters, ariel, times new roman, or surround the words with marching friggen ants. It doesn’t matter how often you say that we didn’t invest after Seville and that the board didn’t back MON.!
Yes we did! Yes they did!
The figures don’t lie!
For God’s sake read them!
Now you may want us to have invested more and risked more, and oh goodness gracious me, I may even agree with you, but (and I accept that hindsight is a marvellous skill) I really wish that all those millions we did invest in enhancing current contracts (cos that’s where it went) had proved to be more effective. I can see a lot of areas which might have made that investment give us a much better football return, but for the life of me I can’t see how I can blame the board!
Believe me, I want to blame someone and I really don’t fancy the bone-begging options that currently are sitting with their paws in the air just now!
That would be a sacrilege!
So I think I will consign it to the jigsaw of history that someone else can put together!
I am pretty sure that all of you who disagree with Paul on the meaning and his analysis of the accounts are not only wrong but should have a fearful glance over their shoulder to make sure that the erstwhile and totally unbeloved ‘Chung’ of my nightmares has indeed shed his mortal coil and is not bearing down upon you, nostrils flaring, gown flapping like an avenging black angel of death, with nuclear duster about to be launched in the direction of the nearest unprotected acne ridden head!
Hopefully he can now do no more than watch in ever mounting unrequited anger from whatever big classroom in the sky or more probably and (may God forgive me) hopefully ‘below’, he now peddles his reign of terror.
We are now at the dawn of a new era and one that I believe promises, (a phrase that both Paul67 and James Forest have used on the unique CelticQuickNews site), a New Celtic.
Well NEW at least to those of you who didn’t have the life enriching experience of the stagnant late fifties and early sixties being suddenly nourished into an era of unbridled success through an injection of skill, style, ambition, and vision of as Carlsberg didn’t say ‘ Carlsberg don’t do Nine in a rows but if we did………..’.
So for me if you’ll pardon the plagiarism it is simply ‘Back to the Future’.
We want a team that excites through not just victories but with a swagger, a gallusness, and a natural élan that is not just a surface mirage but is at the heart and soul of every fibre of our being.
We want to go to games with an expectation of highs and lows of a team that front foot, back, foot, left foot, right foot, head arms and legs gives everything so that when we get back to the pub, home, garden, cardboard box, or doorway, all we want to do is re-live every moment every move, shot, tackle and goal that was served up before us.
We also want the regular pleasure of sticking it right up those charlatans from down Govan way.
It has started.
As of today I believe we will regularly invest in refreshing the team with able and motivated players.
We will also do this in a way that maintains our debt or our profit at a level which satisfies the bankers and the investors.
And why will all this happen?
Well the ingredients of a fast-flowing entertaining team are there. As the season moves on, the season tickets that have not been taken up will not matter a jot, because the available tickets will be bought by non-season ticket holders who want to see the re-birth of a dream.
Nakamura, Zurawski, Beattie, Maloney, Lawson, Kennedy, Boruc, Marshall, Gardyne, O’Dea, Quinn, Mcgeady, Wallace, Petrov.
These are our future.
The world will want to be part of this phenomenon, this most beautiful of teams which play the most beautiful of games.
See in that moment just before you drift off from consciousness to the land of dreams, a million Green and White scarves circling the world! White faces, yellow faces, black faces, and brown faces, every accent you can imagine all led by the raucous passion of a Scottish heart and the lilting eloquence of an Irish soul.
Our team, our club, our being will never be made real by a financial plan and big bank account. The truth is the other way around. Get that bit of magic into the team, into the support and into the management and the accounts will take care of themselves.
Invest your faith in them and invest it and your support in Gordon Strachan. It will be repaid in diamond nights and golden days!
Remember that first MON season.. Remember that treble. Remember that day against St Mirren and Tommy Johnston’s cack-footed goal.
Remember the East End of Glasgow that day, which even the astonishing pilgrimage of Seville could not match in intensity.
Oh you don’t believe me!
Go on! Make an effort because I would much rather go forward with the belief that it will happen and then be disappointed and then believe again, rather than live in a dark dungeon of permanent misery and fear.
When I sing and shout, when I cheer and embrace, when I look around all those green and white crystal balls of certainty who inhabit the seats of the Celtic end and who sing from beginning to end, that’s what I feel and reach out with unfailing optimism and expectation to grasp!.
That will do me!
Keep disputing, keep arguing, but……..
I know that not one of you will ever forget the dream!
See you against the Bairns tomorrow!
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