Pat Bonner has urged Peter Lawwell to find his voice and speak out to the Celtic support.
The current situation isn’t yet at the stage of looking out the cracked crest (in 2020 Lawwell’s only newspaper interview was to the Daily Record) but it’s fair to say that the disconnect between the club and the fans hasn’t been as big since Jack McGinn and Michael Kelly were in the boardroom.
A number of issues have been brewing for years but anger, frustration and concern has boiled over during the first fortnight in 2021 over a trip to Dubai.
The build up was suspicious, flying out the day after losing at Ibrox wasn’t the best of timing but pictures of the manager and captain enjoying a poolside drink were the start of an incredible run of bad news that ended with 13 first team players watching last night’s draw with Hibs while self isolating.
John Kennedy, Gavin Strachan and Scott Brown have all justified the trip, as did a club statement but it is the club CEO that fans want to hear from with most believing that Lawwell would have had the ultimate say in the trip going ahead.
Listening in to Bonner on Go Radio, The Sun reports the former Celtic keeper saying:
I was shocked (that the trip went ahead). If I had the opportunity and somebody to talk to inside Celtic I would’ve phoned up and been really angry. As somebody who played for the club for a long time but also supports the club, to a point where obviously working in the media you have to see what’s on the pitch from a neutral stance.
You still have feelings for the club you played for for 17 years. Very much so. I’m also a shareholder at the club, albeit very small, but all of those people – the fans, shareholders – they have a right to hear from the club and from Peter Lawwell.
There’s no harm in saying, at this point, he doesn’t have to say from a protocol point of view they got it wrong, because they’ll argue they did everything right but from a perception point of view, for going out there in the current climate even though they had planned it in November.
Things change and there’s things changing on a daily and weekly basis. Sometimes you’ve got to come out and say: ‘We’ve got this wrong. From a perception point of view, it was wrong and we apologise to our fans.’
He (Lawwell) doesn’t have to apologise to anybody else but to his fans and all those people I’ve mentioned. ‘We’ll learn from it and we’ll move on’ – I would like to hear that because it would go somewhere to at least saying they’re thinking about what they’re doing but when you don’t hear anything, that’s difficult for the fans.
Anybody within the board, whoever’s the spokesman from a leadership point of view, should be coming out and saying, ‘Listen, guys, we’ve got this wrong and we’ll admit we didn’t read it properly. We got it wrong from that perspective’.
It’s not about whether you did the protocols right, it’s about in the current climate when people can’t leave their houses, they’re really struggling, people in hospitals. Celtic fans are all over the place, in the NHS, they’re working hard, under pressure.
Bonner was signed by Jock Stein in 1978 and played his last match for Celtic in the 1995 Scottish Cup Final win over Airdrie.