It's hard to read the room when the lights have gone out and there’s no doubt the dimmer switch has been turned to its lowest setting at Celtic Park.
Peter Lawwell’s interview with his club’s in-house media eventually elicited the apology that so many of their fans demanded in the wake of taking a trip to Dubai in the middle of a pandemic when those same supporters are being ordered to stay in their houses.
But Celtic couldn’t even get that right. For
a start, the apology only followed an original statement days earlier that reeked of entitlement with the insistence that they had done nothing wrong.
It was only after days of sustained public outcry that eventually the chief executive sat in front of a camera and showed a modicum of remorse – only for that message to be completely overtaken by Lawwell’s remark his club probably had been affected more than any other by the pandemic.
It was a ridiculous statement. Celtic were awarded the title without the season finishing when the pandemic struck. Yes, they probably would have gone on to win it but they were beneficiaries in
that respect.
Try telling Hearts that Celtic have been affected more harshly than they were when ejected from the same league despite being only four points adrift with seven games to play.
Try telling Partick Thistle – a club that have been uniformly shafted.
Two points behind Queen of the South with a game in hand in the Championship and they still got sent down.
That led to them receiving only £150,000 in government grant aid, while the Championship outfits were handed £500,000.
And even this week, the hits kept on coming with Thistle and Falkirk, both full-time clubs, forced to shut up shop for at least three weeks and not even have their players in for training. Already starved of cash, they can’t even rely on fans buying their match streams to keep the wolf from the doors.
No, there are so many reasons why Celtic are nowhere near the worst affected by the effects of coronavirus. They spent £250,000 to fly away to get a bit of sun while their fans were chilled to the bone by another Old Firm defeat that just about ended their 10-in-a-row dreams.
They came back, initially showing no contrition and then, when Hibs asked them to do another Covid test before playing them on Monday night, refused to do so.
Even that act, an acknowledgement that the other team’s families had concerns over the match going ahead, would have sent out a message that they
were listening, that they understood.
But there was none of that.
The optics have been terrible and not the ones behind the Dubai bar where their players were photographed sitting less than two metres apart from each other.
And a million miles away from the high standards the club claims to be at the core of its existence.
