"Players sometimes won't come unless you've got Champions League football guaranteed," he added. "Then after that it's pretty difficult to attract the right kind of player that you want in a two-week window." So we'd better do our business right now??? “We have the qualifier in the middle of July: we could be interested in players actually still playing at the World Cup at that time,” “So it’s important that this window we get something fruitful out of [this window], for going forward in the second half of this season and into the summer. “That doesn’t mean to say we won’t do business in the summer [but] I’d like to bring one or two in between now and next week. That's great news. That means we'll be getting players the manager thinks can cut it in the Champions League. I have a zero-tolerance rule. I have spoken to the players about this before. Any sign of any sort of racism against colour, religion, background, will be an instant sackable offence. ZERO tolerance......ZERO “None of them would get in my team. That’s not having a go at them but I’ve got a very good team. Who you chatting bout Lenny? “Leigh Griffiths has been a stand-out player for Hibs, Michael Higdon has had a brilliant season, as have Andrew Shinnie and Niall McGinn. Oh ok then...... please log in to view this image please log in to view this image
Someone who isn't a massive ****. Oh I dunno. I'm just blowing off steam. I expect the thumb headed racist will score lots of goals for Celtic but the point is that Lennon is now telling us about how good a signing this will be when 8-9 months ago he was telling us he wasn't good enough. His credibility is ****ed. It is for this bear anyway. He's got till the windae slams shut to make this right.
He's five live saying that we had a 3m contract buy out agreed with a player in Turkey but it became too complicated...... please log in to view this image
Everyone was creaming themselves over our scouting / signing strategy a year or two ago and crediting John Park and the manager - now that the random luck of finding decent players has swung against us again the very same people are in for criticism. I didn't give Lennon credit for finding Wanyama or Hooper and don't blame him for not finding adequate replacements http://www.not606.com/showthread.php/178186-Park-Life - our cheap-ass trial and error strategy hasn't changed, only the success of that strategy.
My criticism is of Lennon talking through his arse. Hooper apart, our success with strikers has been shocking. I expect Thumbheid to score lots of goals and value fer money, but he's a prick. And Lennon has compromised himself with his own words.
We're shopping at the bargain end and we're going to have a few players who look decent in scouting missions but turn out ****e. The only way to make it less about luck is to buy players with a recognised history, and players with a good history cost money. We are a PLC with a large cost base and all the money is fully accounted for, so every fan can see exactly where the money goes - we aren't spending a fortune on players because we don't have a fortune to spend. Even when we do find a few good bargain players we get some newly promoted bawbag team from the Premier League with £40m of new money (and no fixed costs running a big team/fan base operation like ours) coming after our players, so we can't afford to keep them. On top of all this our idiot neighbours died and removed the only competition we had from our league, so outside of non-guaranteed European games there's few footballing reasons to be based in Scotland. None of this is the fault of the management, outside of Captain Hindsighting it (shouldn't have signed that Bangura) there is probably **** all any of us could do any better if we were put in charge.
People tell me to shut the **** up when I defend signing no one (like now), people tell me to shut to **** up when I'm not excitable about signing someone (like then http://www.not606.com/showthread.php/189660-Celtic-s-on-loan-defender-Rami-Gershon-is-delighted-to-sign/page2) - the one similarity between this situation and the ones I have linked to is that everyone seems to be crediting the results to management; A and B happened because of good decisions here and there or bad decisions here and there. Actually A and B likely happened because of about 200 variables, with the management of Neil Lennon only being a single (albeit important) influence on the entire process. If there are no good players on the market for your budget then you can't pull one out of your arse, it's out of your control - if you come across two or three decent cheap players at one time (they're like buses) then you try to sign them as we did with Hooper, Wanyama and Ledley - the 30 days of this transfer window can only be taken as a small sample in this entire process, and the fact that people can so quickly swing from their early fawning of our transfer strategy is so stereotypically fickle.
My only concern is that half the players we sign dont seem to get a good chance of first team action. Signing Griffiths is an indication that Lennon is not entirely confident in the strikers we have, yet we spent decent money on Balde who has not really had a chance to show he is the man to lead the line. Granted, Lennon will be seeing him day in, day out, but everybody knows first team games are completely different to friendlies, development games and training.
For the record, I think Griffiths will be a good signing and Lennon is doing a great job, but I see how people are frustrated on many levels. He talked about doing business in this window, few weeks later he said we could afford to spend £6m.....every forum and social media site was talking up Fletcher, Snodgrass, an Icelandic striker I've never seen, in part because he raised the expectation.
I've took a defensive position and I don't want to stick with it at all costs - but the likes of McCourt looked brilliant on the pitch but was never given a chance because he apparently trained like a *****. They had the same scenario in OldCo where Walter Smith refused to play the SPL's record goal scorer in important games.
