Celtic Diary Wednesday August 12: We All Stand Together

Boligoli Boli, the defender who makes an occasional appearance to remind us that he’s here, got a little bit fed up of people asking if he was still at Celtic, and presumably because he has a sideline in cheap cigarettes, popped over to Spain for a day or two and it’s probably fair to say that we all now know he’s still at Celtic.

Except, if course, that probably won’t be true for much longer, and he’d have been as well using the time off to look for a new house and a new club.

In fact, if he’d picked up an automatic rifle and headed into town to a shopping mall he’d probably be more warmly thought of than he is this morning.

With the plague still in town, any sort of foreign travel requires quarantine or isolation either on return or on arrival. Boli not only ignored that, he was horrified to find that he was in the squad for the next game, and found himself on the pitch as well, something that lets face it, neither he nor us could have imagined in our wildest dreams, and most of us would admit dreams can be pretty wild.

A long story short, Celtic now have had their next two domestic  games postponed, meaning that plucky new rivals “rangers ” will probably never have a better chance to secure their first major trophy and although we all know deep down this level of dominace on Scotland, where we keep winning everything we enter, would come to an end one day, none of us imagined that we’d do our level best to make sure it was sooner rather than later.

Party politics aside, the football supporter is an easy target for vote seeking non entities, as we saw with the re branding of a number of offences under the OBFA, which made it difficult to go to a game without attracting the attention of the police or the papers.

Given the chance to have a pop at players, well it was too much even for the normally placid Nicola Sturgeon to to ignore.

First there was the “misunderstanding ” of the Covid testing rules by one particular club/company, which caused the SPFL and SFA to apologise profusely and promise it would never happen again, which was largely let slide, but certainly noted at Holyrood. That was followed by Aberdeen players popping out for a beer after a club meal, which got the hackles on the first ministers neck rising, and when Bolingoli topped the lot by taking to the skies on a spectacularly ill judged day out, she simply played her three strikes and out card and reminded everyone that the reason there haven’t been any deaths in Scotland for a couple of weeks is down to a lot of people making a lot of sacrifices, and announced that she was

“sick of people taking the piss ”

although to be fair her initial speech was redrafted in case it went out before the watershed.

It then transpired that Boli, although far and away the worst offender, wasn’t the only one. and Celtic aren’t the only club with young , wealthy men who have a priviliged lifestyle that means they can;t quite understand why they are not getting the same attention as they would normally get when they go to the shop in the moring for fags and milk when they have to wear a mask.

Footballers, by and large, need that love and attention.

On matchday, they thrive on the abuse and encouragement from the crowds.

They’re not getting that now, and quite a few of them, north and south of the border, have had to be spoken to by their bosses and reminded of their responsibilities.

In England, the same people who plough money into the sport are largely the same people who report on it. They are not going to draw attention to any minor misdemeanours…or major ones, in fact, that might lead to the Westminster government taking any sort of action.

Although they do have the added advantage down there of a government that actively puts wealth over health so even of a whole squad of players went on a drink and drugs spree across Europe, it would not go reported.

In Scotland, it’s different, as we know.

In Scotland, there are plenty of hacks and plenty of papers ready to seize on any mistake by any Celtic player.

Along with the Bolingoli escapade, the club are looking into a few indiscretions by a few other players, which are nowhere near as serious, and ordinarily would be explained away as daft wee boys having a daft wee time.

You can brace yourself for one or two bar owners sightly exaggerrating an instance or two, that actually didnlt even happen, but there’s publicity and money on thise tales, and to the delight of the media, which has been and will continue to bring a negative light into anything Celtic do that will derail the express train that only stops to pick up another trophy.

We knew that would happen, and it is happening now.

It’s had one effect already, a furious squad of players have woken up from a bout of complacency that could have seen it be another decade before we had a shit at ten in a row.

Living in a bubble, without input from the stands and the adrenaline rush it gives, players had fallen into a sort of sleepwalk of routine, training, home, training, and so on, woth hardly a bout of reckless abandonment to be seen.

Not now, the wagons have been circled and the ranch is secure.

Our season started at roughly the same time Nicola Sturgeon decided she might put an end to it.

Celtic are going back to work, and those trophies and titles will have to be wrenched from our cold dead hands….