As the tennis balls heroically arced towards King Dermot on the 15th hole at the Alfred Dunhill Links golf tournament in St Andrews, I was reminded of an observation imparted to me when I was an ardently politicised teenager half a century ago:
“Theory without practice is sterile, and practice without theory is blind”.
Dear reader, allow me to clarify.
When the event at St Andrews levitated my phone, my first thought was:
What do they think they will achieve by this?
This post on X from the Celtic Way at 7.11 pm contained a safe enough prediction.
That is, if “erage” was meant to be “enrage”.
I’ll bet on the latter.
1 hour and 58 minutes later, THIS arrived on the club site.
Just in case it ever gets lost, here it is in full.
Unlike the statement this time last year, when Brendan Rodgers was…err…resigned by Desmond, this one wasn’t signed.
However, it clearly had the imprimatur of the man Martin O’Neill refers to as “the owner”.
It is certainly laced with the same fury in every paragraph.
Of course, this now tees up the impending AGM rather nicely.
The Celtic Trust has three motions for shareholders to consider.
Lots of worthy stuff contained therein.
Best of luck with them, especially the third one, which DEMANDS an apology from “the PLC” for letting Fredo out to play last year.
As one fictional billionaire patriarch might have put it:
“I love you, but you’re not serious people”.
Conversely, this from the folks at the Celtic Underground is clearly the work of grown-ups.
Here is the key message in the piece:
If the objective is specifically “Get Dermot Out”, people need to stop dealing in slogans and start dealing in arithmetic.
For the avoidance of doubt, throwing tennis balls isn’t a strategy for anything, even if it does make the thrower feel, momentarily, important.
Discover more from Phil Mac Giolla Bháin
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Interesting that we crash out of the Champions League again, although being
4-0 up on aggregate with an hour to play points at more of a footballing collapse than anything to do at Board level. However, once again recruitment was too slow over the summer.
If you are correct Phil, and that a meeting to discuss that collapse wasn’t scheduled until a month after that debacle, then that tells you everything you need to know about the malaise within the organisation.
Four and a half weeks allowed to amble past before any major discussion takes place. That our Board have to wait on a visit to the country of the non-executive director to have that meeting, but only after he’s played a round of golf, really says it all.
They are incapable of functioning as an efficient Board without their lord and master being present. That isn’t good enough.
I genuinely think protests should only be carried out at games and not by people hiding their identity and not like the one at st Andrews. The other people playing in the tournament were probably scared as not expecting this behavior.
I used to say we were better than the other side of Glasgow but not anymore
He’ll be back next year alright. He’s a Dunhill fixture who could buy the Old Course if he chose to.
Desmond is going nowhere unless he sells his shares at market value (at least). For that to happen, he must view a sale as attractive, and have a willing buyer in the wings.
The best way to chase Desmond out is to embarrass him. Where better, than on his beloved golf course (the irony), in front of television cameras, professional golfers, celebrities and fellow Forbes listers?
Dermot Desmond is the absent landlord. His input appears minimal. He is viewed as a parasite. If that is untrue, then the misperception is of his own creation.
Throwing tennis balls achieved a pyrrhic victory for the #StopTheGame campaign by Irish football supporters, they prevented Israel from sportswashing it’s genocide on Irish soil.
Maybe this intelligent business man should fore go the hissyfit and give some thought as why it has come to this. The club stagnating hasn’t produced one sentence never mind an 850 word whine, so forgive us if we’re not interested in him having an extra bit of time to line up his putt.
It’s not about delaying his putt. Those Celtic fans interrupted an international sporting occasion to vent their frustration and, in doing so, embarrassed the club and its law abiding fans. It was simply unacceptable behaviour!
The only thing that embarrassed this club is that ridiculous statement issued by the official Celtic media.
Do not condone, but totally understand the frustration of supporters Ken (Desmond) Dodd and his diddy men have run the club as a parochial golf club. Even the AGM with Mr. Angry disrespecting supporters last year was a disgrace suited for a parochial golf club.
Many have supported and paid tens of thousands of pounds to Celtic Football Club over the years, the current cabal running the club have to go. Have paid monies to enjoy Celtic and support since the fifties, the Ferencvaros game was my last, Wayne Biggins had more heart.
I agree with the Celtic statement on this occasion. The behaviour of those fans is totally unacceptable. I have supported my club for over 70 years but I am embarrassed to be a Celtic fan today!
Unacceptable in what way?
He ignores any protest at CP. He is rarely there and any sort if protest tends to end in the protesters receiving a ban.
He ignores any protest at the AGM. He is there even less and any protest is met with a pre prepared dressing down from the Nepo and then ending of the AGM.
Protests are meant to disrupt. Him being embarrassed in front of his billionaire chums seems the only way that anynprotest can puncture his conscious
Getting soft in your old age, I can think of protests the British establishment labelled in exactly the same way.
If nothing else it let him know that he wasn’t going to get away with his bullying , and mis-management in private. Bullying of people who have invested hundreds of millions of pounds, and at least as much from the heart, in Celtic.
Also, would you credit it, the board and the super being who is Desmond, all of a sudden found a voice, hitherto missing from their fan engagement.
Bullies have to be confronted, not worked around. They have already trashed the reputation they talk about, a reputation built up by fans over many years, not by them. What’s he gonna do now?, destroy the squad?, bring in an out of touch manager?, destroy the football structure?, oops!, too late.
This sort of thing would make anybody avoid working with the club. I think it’s juvenile and totally counter productive.
I suppose we could clap him to death
Nobody with any self respect would work for us just to be a well paid DD💩deflector, hence the board we have.
If the Principal shareholder put as much effort into addressing the issues at the club as he puts into his statements, things like this might not happen. Whether you agree with it or not, and whether you think it is effective or not, fans will continue to make their feelings known in different ways.
Apart from a few egos, nobody was hurt by the St Andrews protest, and no casualties have been reported. What this all does in terms of fan/club relationship is another matter entirely. I will get round to reading the statement in full in time but for now, the bulk of my sympathy still lies firmly with the many long suffering Celtic fans around the world HH
To be honest I suspected this was a “false flag operation ” performed by Union Bears. It appears I was wrong. My thoughts were that Celtic supporters had nothing to gain from it. It appears I was wrong.
No game of golf should be bigger or more important than Celtic. On the weekend in which there was supposed to be a genuine focus on sorting out significant fundamental systemic issues within Celtic, was it not possible to forego one green for another? If certain sponsors and wider business interests of Desmond have been impacted it’s a case of c’mon the midgies. It’s one tactic in a suite of options that brings attention to suboptimal lazy business practices.
Well said.