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.
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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.