Paulo Bernardo spent the last season contributing little to nothing, so his departure is unfortunate but hardly unexpected. It’s unfortunate because I think we all saw periods where he looked on the verge of a breakthrough. He arrived with a very respectable pedigree as Captain of Portugal Under-21s and immediately looked like an accomplished player.

He went through a strange period of only being deployed in the most crucial games. Exclusively used in Europe and not domestically, he was technically gifted and ensured possession and continuity. However, he generally did so at the expense of creativity and effective play in the final third. Paulo insisted he was an attacking midfielder, but an actual statistic at the time was that only the goalkeeper had fewer forward passes. For a midfielder, that’s pretty shocking.

Then he scored a beauty against The Rangers, which I was privileged to see in person, and I was convinced this was his entrance onto the biggest stage and we’d found ourselves a valuable player. However, he did not progress. In fact, he regressed if anything. I disagree with those who say he wasn’t given a fair chance. He had many opportunities and latterly failed to grasp any of them. You would hardly know he was on the pitch at times; such was his failure to make an impact.

Why am I dissecting Paulo’s time at Celtic? Wasted talent is a particular bugbear of mine. I hate to see it, and I see it here. For me, there are only two explanations for getting so close and failing to take that final step. More than likely, you lack the necessary drive, ambition, and focus, which is all the more disappointing given that your Captain is the embodiment of those qualities.

Or maybe that period when he was on the verge of a breakthrough was the equivalent of Nicholas Kuhn’s purple patch with us. In other words, perhaps that was the very best of which he was capable?  Because I hate to see talent wasted, I hope he is inspired by the move and rekindles his once promising career.

Teemu Embarrassment

However, we may not have lost a reliable starter, but we have lost a once-reliable option off the bench. This would be useful currently, as the bench on Monday was so weak that Teemu would have refused to sell it.

The only potential game changer was Osmand, a talented and pacy player but also just a young fella with minimal experience, who is trying to make his own breakthrough. The rest of the bench didn’t provide similar quality alternatives, allowing for a change of focus or formation, but rather significant downgrades in most positions. In fact, we didn’t even have left back cover at all, with Scales (if you can even really call him valid left back cover, rather than just someone who can fill in at left back) suspended, and this resulted in one of our best players having to switch from right to left, where he has rarely ever played.

We also managed to nullify our pre-season star in Camilo Duran. It’s very clear why he failed in Portugal and ended up in Azerbaijan. He’s not a winger, and I very much doubt that’s where he wants to play. Qarabag converted him into a highly effective, energetic, pressing, nuisance of a striker who looked very dangerous in his pre-season outings. Because of our inability to sign a left winger, instead we decided to neuter one of our biggest attacking threats by playing him in a position where we will never see the best of him.

Unconcerned by the Countdown

There are nine days remaining until we have to name a squad for the Champions League qualifier against LASK, the Austrian double winners. It seems clear the board will add no more than one player to the squad before the deadline, and we are woefully short of quality in depth. The team we saw start on Monday may be the strongest team we see this season, which is the horrifying reality of years of managed decline, outrageously poor squad management and unacceptably dire recruitment.

The board have been steadily chipping away at standards to the extent that we have taken a very limited squad that scraped over the line by a matter of minutes, stripped 15 players from it and added only two. Martin O’Neill says he’s focussed on quality, not quantity. Unfortunately, recruiting the quantity of quality we desperately need always seemed beyond the ability of this board, and so it has proven.

It seems they will be content with hanging onto Engels and Johnston until the Champions League qualifier is out of the way before they spend another penny. Happy to have bought a lethal weapon, they seem incapable of purchasing the ammunition.

Also, the incoherence of the transfer policy seems mind-boggling. We are told they spent over five million euros on Duran, yet we seem surprised that he’s not a winger and/or non-committal about changing formations to play a front two. Given what we’ve seen in pre-season, a formation change looks unlikely, so did we really spend approximately five million on a reserve striker when we’re screaming out for wingers and midfielders?

The manager told us that he expected the principal shareholder to step up and very generously authorise the spending of the fans’ money. He stepped in to get the Hogh deal done, but it seems his enthusiasm is limited to a currently negative 900k net spend. In fact, if Celtic get anywhere close to a net spend in this window, we may well see a vastly improved team; however, that will be too late to minimise the risk of not qualifying for the Champions League and would fly in the face of the board’s insistence on adding to the ludicrously unnecessary money mountain at the expense of the product on the park.

The Eighty-Million-Pound Gamble

I am genuinely stunned that, after last year in particular, they would risk Almatygeddon 2.0 and the inevitable recriminations and fan fury that would follow. Wilson called repeatedly for unity, but it appears that they are prepared to risk further and deeper division in order to avoid spending money they already have until they have guarantees of funds arriving for our players.

It’s as if this transfer window is a stand-alone event and the previous funds squirrelled away at the expense of an ever-declining squad quality have no bearing on the context or their decision-making.

I cannot fathom the decision to fail to strengthen, when the funds are available, will almost certainly be recouped, and the alternative is to squander £80 million of potential CL income over two years in the face of the easiest potential qualification ties we could have.

Not good business.

Utter madness.