CELTIC CASH CRISIS

THE damage Rangers have done to Celtic by winning the last two titles became obvious today when the Parkhead accounts were published.

And while the near £6m of debt which was announced is nowhere as serious as the level of money owed by Rangers, it shows how important this season's championship will be for the future of both sides of the Old Firm.

Chairman, John Reid may have been - as the BBC described him - bullish about the loss, but it's well worth remembering a similar description of Sir David Murray's attitude during the years when Rangers were slipping towards their present predicament.

The voyage back is long and hard, and while the direct entry to the riches of the Champions League, achieved by Rangers last season and again this year, has gone a long way towards steadying the ship at Ibrox, there are still stormy seas to navigate.

But, however choppy the waters, it is a course which will not be open to the team which finishes at the top of the table next spring. Next year the champions will have to pre-qualify, making it harder to come out of the squall and dock in a safe haven.

Therefore Celtic, although their debt is smaller than that which burdened Rangers two years ago,  are not in as happy a position as the champions were even then. For at that time the solution was simply to win the next two titles, despite cutting costs, and the Champions League money would ride to the rescue.

For Celtic, even winning the SPL this time out does not guarantee those riches, and that presents a problem, especially at a time when there is a hint of them adopting Murray's old discredited and disastrous mantra of slapping  a tenner on the table for every fiver the other half of the Old Firm spends.

Finishing as runners up, however is unthinkable as that means having to go through the two prequalfying rounds which stalled Celtic's progress this summer. The odds on this season's champions making it into Europe's blue riband tournament will be long enough, let alone what they will be like for the runners-up making it through.

Celtic's plight can be traced back to 14 months ago when chairman Reid and chief executive Peter Lawwell took what proved to be the financially crippling decision to employ Tony Mowbray as the successor to Gordon Strachan.

Though there are many who believe the disgraceful attitude of a large - majority? - of Celtic supporters towards Strachan, which led to the vacancy being created in the first place, is at the root of Celtic's current plight. That veteran Parkhead watcher - writer and broadcaster Hugh Keevins - hit the nail on the head with his view that Strachan would never be accepted by the faithful, as he lacked Celtic DNA.

Strachan was often hounded by the crowd at Parkhead ,and even more so on the road, where the extreme and hard line element of the Celtic support is more vocally identifiable.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions ,and those Celtic fans who voiced their dis-approval of Strachan clearly thought their intent was for the good of Celtic .

However, what they have learned about is the law of unintended consequences. Perhaps if Strachan had felt more loved by Celtic supporters he may have stayed on after Rangers won the title in 2009, following his three in a row successes.

Had he done so, there would have been no Mowbray, and none of the extra costs incurred to unseat him, which have had such a devastating effect on Celtic's financial situation.

Or, as my old Presbyterian granny used to warn....beware of what you wish for!

........AND THERE'S MORE


POOR old Craig Levein. As though the tanking Scotland got in Sweden wasn't bad enough, the story about the scribbles on a piece of paper found in the team's dressing room, have held him and his backroom staff up to ridicule.

The Swedes, having undone Levein's Scotland with such ease, are now having a good old fashioned belly laugh at the national team's preparation.

However, it was something which happened back in Scotland the morning after the match which should be of even greater cause for concern for those who have the good of the Scotland team close to their heart.

Firstly, Levein chose to de-brief the Sunday newspaper journalists at the luxury country hotel where he stayed after the Scotland flight landed at Glasgow airport in the wee small hours.

Now I have been involved in similar briefings dating back to when Jock Stein was in charge, and including Andy Roxburgh, Craig Brown, Berti Vogts, Walter Smith, Alex McLeish and George Burley, and each time they held court it was on Scottish Football Association premises.

It was though, what Levein was reported as having said which was worrying, as he tried to explain away a defeat which carried much of the same stigma attached to the beatings in Wales under Vogts and Burley, and in Norway when Burley was in charge.

According to Levein, he was the least concerned of all about the defeat and its nature, with him going on to describe the 3-0 humiliation visited on his Scotland side as being akin to a club losing a pre season friendly.

If I may be so bold as to correct him. It is far from that. International friendly games are included in the complicated points structure put together by FIFA which determines Scotland's place in the world rankings, which in turn is included in the calculations of seeding when qualification for World Cup and European Championships come around.

It is defeats, such as the many suffered under Vogts, which saw a Scotland side ranked in the top 20 and seeded 2nd when he inherited it from Brown, slither to nearly 80th and nosedive to fourth seeds. Which is why we found ourselves in a section which included  then World Champions, Italy, beaten finalists France, and quarter finalists Ukraine.

Therefore the outcome of friendlies do not merely matter. They are vital for Scottish chances of ever reaching the finals of a major tournament again. Which is why the shrewd Smith took so few. Maybe if Levein had taken the trouble of going to work last Thursday, somebody at the SFA would have made that point to him ahead of his meeting with the Press, and saved him from making a similar verbal blunder to the one somebody on his backroomn staff committed to paper in Sweden.

ENDS