James Forrest
The Emperor of Ice Cream
I had the strangest feeling this week when I walked into Grace’s for that seismic meeting on Wednesday. It was a sense of time moving so quickly that events from long ago might just as easily have been yesterday, coupled with a weird disconnect that had made the last few days feel like weeks.
The first emotion came from remembering my last visit to Grace’s. I had arrived early for the meeting and so went into the bar, sitting in the same seat I had occupied on that earlier occasion—the seat beneath the portrait of Brendan Rodgers.
I remembered the exact day: it was the day after the Cup Final, when I was there with Paulina before she went home. That day had been depressing, coming so soon after a terrible result. Sitting back in the same seat, under the same picture, it felt like hardly any time had elapsed at all.
At the same time, the spell between last weekend and Wednesday seemed to stretch out endlessly, every minute of every day weighed down by events. To hold both those feelings at once was bizarre. Three days that felt like weeks, and months that had flown past in the blink of an eye. I sat with a beer trying to process it.
They say a week is a long time in politics.
I’ve seen that first-hand, watched governments unravel in days. Keir Starmer’s Labour government looks like it’s in that territory already. When Starmer woke up last Friday, things were starting to spiral. Within a week, his deputy had resigned in scandal and, by Friday, Peter Mandelson—his ambassador to the US—was out too, brought down by the Epstein affair. For Starmer, that week must have felt like a lifetime.
Only one group had a worse week: the directors of Celtic Football Club.
It began a week ago with their deranged attack on Rodgers in the press—a move the manager rightly called cowardly when he sat down with the media yesterday. As if a botched assassination attempt on their own employee wasn’t bad enough, they followed it with a catastrophic club statement.
Within hours it had provoked the first no-confidence motions, which swelled over three days into a full-scale fan rebellion. That’s how I found myself in Grace’s again, reflecting on time’s strange elasticity—months vanishing in a flash, days dragging on like weeks—and recalling that last time I sat there, the day after the Cup Final.
Then, the only solace we’d taken was that defeat would surely push the board to rebuild properly in the summer. How wrong we were.
Few weeks in Celtic’s modern history have been so momentous.
Last Friday, the Association and the Irish Association were meeting at Celtic Park. Reports say the CSA–Irish Association meeting was a disaster, with Nicholson at his sneering, arrogant, condescending worst. His comment to Gerry from the Irish Association was particularly jaw-dropping: that he did indeed have a five-year strategy pinned to his noticeboard, with a note under it reading “share it with fans.”
A joke, apparently. That he would even think to say such a thing, in front of representatives of mass membership organisations demanding answers from an horrific summer, shows how clueless these people are.
Friday flowed into Saturday and Sunday.
As if to underline their ineptitude, the club released their statement at 9pm on Saturday night, before the Association’s membership meeting the following day. That decision turbocharged the meeting into history: for the first time, the CSA passed a motion of no confidence in the Celtic board—and it did so unanimously.
The floodgates opened. From then on, Wednesday’s meeting wasn’t just predictable, it was inevitable. Even so, the speed with which events moved shocked me.
By the time I arrived at the meeting, it felt like a year had passed in only a few days. That’s how it is when you’re caught in a cycle where there’s an update every 10 minutes, a statement every 20, and fresh fan outrage every half hour.
Last Saturday’s actions were among the most self-destructive I’ve ever seen from a major organisation not actively trying to implode.
Our media department is plainly unfit for purpose. Whoever signed off on that statement is deranged, and whoever wrote it is certifiable. I would presume the same individuals were behind both that fiasco and the Rodgers hit-piece the Sun ran that morning—because if there are more than a handful of people inside Celtic Park capable of that level of lunacy, the building wouldn’t still be standing.
It was V. I. Lenin who said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
That captures this moment more than “a week is a long time in politics.”
The mismanagement of Celtic has been festering for years, covered over by the success of various managers and teams. In truth, it has been a decade where nothing fundamental has changed, a decade when the collapse of the first Ibrox club gave our board an easier ride than they would otherwise have had. They coasted.
But in the space of a few weeks—closing of the transfer window, our exit from the Champions League, and now the firestorm of the past seven days—it must feel to them like decades of complacency catching up all at once.
And this is only the beginning. The bill has come due, and it carries heavy interest. Too many people have grown too comfortable in their seats, and that comfort is exactly what will make what happens next so hard for them to handle.
This past week may feel like a mere introduction compared with what is to come. They had better brace themselves, as we all should, because everything has changed. Things have been broken that cannot be fixed, done that cannot be undone, and said that cannot be unsaid.
But I take comfort from knowing this isn’t destruction—it is renewal. It feels more like a difficult birth than a spiral to disaster. Once we are through it, we will be stronger, happier, and better off for having made the journey.
The post Seven days that rocked Celtic: How last Saturday changed everything. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
Continue reading...
The first emotion came from remembering my last visit to Grace’s. I had arrived early for the meeting and so went into the bar, sitting in the same seat I had occupied on that earlier occasion—the seat beneath the portrait of Brendan Rodgers.
I remembered the exact day: it was the day after the Cup Final, when I was there with Paulina before she went home. That day had been depressing, coming so soon after a terrible result. Sitting back in the same seat, under the same picture, it felt like hardly any time had elapsed at all.
At the same time, the spell between last weekend and Wednesday seemed to stretch out endlessly, every minute of every day weighed down by events. To hold both those feelings at once was bizarre. Three days that felt like weeks, and months that had flown past in the blink of an eye. I sat with a beer trying to process it.
They say a week is a long time in politics.
I’ve seen that first-hand, watched governments unravel in days. Keir Starmer’s Labour government looks like it’s in that territory already. When Starmer woke up last Friday, things were starting to spiral. Within a week, his deputy had resigned in scandal and, by Friday, Peter Mandelson—his ambassador to the US—was out too, brought down by the Epstein affair. For Starmer, that week must have felt like a lifetime.
Only one group had a worse week: the directors of Celtic Football Club.
It began a week ago with their deranged attack on Rodgers in the press—a move the manager rightly called cowardly when he sat down with the media yesterday. As if a botched assassination attempt on their own employee wasn’t bad enough, they followed it with a catastrophic club statement.
Within hours it had provoked the first no-confidence motions, which swelled over three days into a full-scale fan rebellion. That’s how I found myself in Grace’s again, reflecting on time’s strange elasticity—months vanishing in a flash, days dragging on like weeks—and recalling that last time I sat there, the day after the Cup Final.
Then, the only solace we’d taken was that defeat would surely push the board to rebuild properly in the summer. How wrong we were.
Few weeks in Celtic’s modern history have been so momentous.
Last Friday, the Association and the Irish Association were meeting at Celtic Park. Reports say the CSA–Irish Association meeting was a disaster, with Nicholson at his sneering, arrogant, condescending worst. His comment to Gerry from the Irish Association was particularly jaw-dropping: that he did indeed have a five-year strategy pinned to his noticeboard, with a note under it reading “share it with fans.”
A joke, apparently. That he would even think to say such a thing, in front of representatives of mass membership organisations demanding answers from an horrific summer, shows how clueless these people are.
Friday flowed into Saturday and Sunday.
As if to underline their ineptitude, the club released their statement at 9pm on Saturday night, before the Association’s membership meeting the following day. That decision turbocharged the meeting into history: for the first time, the CSA passed a motion of no confidence in the Celtic board—and it did so unanimously.
The floodgates opened. From then on, Wednesday’s meeting wasn’t just predictable, it was inevitable. Even so, the speed with which events moved shocked me.
By the time I arrived at the meeting, it felt like a year had passed in only a few days. That’s how it is when you’re caught in a cycle where there’s an update every 10 minutes, a statement every 20, and fresh fan outrage every half hour.
Last Saturday’s actions were among the most self-destructive I’ve ever seen from a major organisation not actively trying to implode.
Our media department is plainly unfit for purpose. Whoever signed off on that statement is deranged, and whoever wrote it is certifiable. I would presume the same individuals were behind both that fiasco and the Rodgers hit-piece the Sun ran that morning—because if there are more than a handful of people inside Celtic Park capable of that level of lunacy, the building wouldn’t still be standing.
It was V. I. Lenin who said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
That captures this moment more than “a week is a long time in politics.”
The mismanagement of Celtic has been festering for years, covered over by the success of various managers and teams. In truth, it has been a decade where nothing fundamental has changed, a decade when the collapse of the first Ibrox club gave our board an easier ride than they would otherwise have had. They coasted.
But in the space of a few weeks—closing of the transfer window, our exit from the Champions League, and now the firestorm of the past seven days—it must feel to them like decades of complacency catching up all at once.
And this is only the beginning. The bill has come due, and it carries heavy interest. Too many people have grown too comfortable in their seats, and that comfort is exactly what will make what happens next so hard for them to handle.
This past week may feel like a mere introduction compared with what is to come. They had better brace themselves, as we all should, because everything has changed. Things have been broken that cannot be fixed, done that cannot be undone, and said that cannot be unsaid.
But I take comfort from knowing this isn’t destruction—it is renewal. It feels more like a difficult birth than a spiral to disaster. Once we are through it, we will be stronger, happier, and better off for having made the journey.
The post Seven days that rocked Celtic: How last Saturday changed everything. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
Continue reading...
