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Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now! In keeping with pretty much everything else you’ve read, seen or heard about the Scottish League Cup final, you’d be forgiven for presuming today’s Football Daily will almost entirely be devoted to the fact Celtic is run by an incompetent bunch of cheapskates who appear to consider their paying customers an entitled rabble of insubordinate plebs, with only a cursory mention of plucky little St Mirren’s actual triumph at the end. Except that’s not how this daily football email rolls and by sneering at everyone else’s coverage of the Buddies’ not-entirely-surprising Hampden Park triumph, we’ve now mentioned their win twice already, which means we can exclusively devote what remains of this section to going in two-footed with our views on the Scottish champions. While the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers is rooted in deep-seated, historically complex social, political, and sectarian divisions that make even the most trivial slight feel like a declaration of war, Football Daily has been highly amused to note that it is fuelled by even more absurd levels of pettiness than even grizzled cynics like us thought possible. Not content with seeing Rangers descend into the status of bona fide bin-fire at the beginning of this season, the Celtic board couldn’t just revel in their rival’s misfortune but instead felt compelled to shout “Haud ma bevvy! ” and try to out-do them in the utterly avoidable self-harm stakes. Where to start? There was that miserliness in the transfer window. The embarrassingly early exit from Bigger Cup. The resignation of Brendan Rodgers and subsequent divisive and self-serving statement from majority shareholder Dermot Desmond accusing the recently departed head coach of being “divisive” and “self-serving”. There was the AGM, abandoned shortly after it started due in no small part to the fact both Desmond’s son, Ross, and the Celtic chief suit, Peter Lawwell, treated their audience with such condescending disdain, it’s small wonder the fans present didn’t raze Celtic Park to the ground in righteous anger, rather than just shout a few entirely justified unpleasantries at assorted members of their club’s breathtakingly arrogant hierarchy. Upon realising they’d dropped a massive b0llock by treating the customers who keep the club’s vast reservoir of cash topped up, Celtic set about trying to appease them but obviously couldn’t even get that right. Having welcomed back the popular Martin O’Neill as interim head coach until they found somebody the fans were inevitably going to consider a downgrade, the Celtic board will have been pleased this elderly but safe pair of hands managed to steady the ship on and off the field. However, rather than hang on to their favourite Martin, Desmond, Lawell and chums elected to bid him farewell in order to appoint somebody new ahead of a trio of big games against the league leaders, a team of Serie A grandees and a rabble of comparative church mice in a major cup final. And this morning, after Celtic were subjected to back-to-back-to-back trimmings by Hearts, Roma and St Mirren, the club’s top brass will have listened in mounting horror as O’Neill sat in the Talk Sport radio studio, trying his best to sound more diplomatic than smug as he revealed he would have happily stayed at the club for longer and fielded a succession of calls from distraught Glaswegians all begging him to return immediately if not sooner. We can’t help but feel genuinely sorry for Wilfried Nancy; through no great fault of his own, Celtic’s new boss already looks like a dead man walking just eight days and three matches into his reign because the geniuses in the boardroom couldn’t wait an extra week to stick a contract under his nose. Still though. St Mirren, eh? Weren’t they absolutely marvellous? Join Niall Mc Veigh at 8pm GMT for Premier League updates on Manchester United 2-2 Bournemouth. “So many times I saw him Face Time his family and friends, telling them what he was going to do and, more often than not, he would do it. In those games, he would pick up the ball and go past five, six players. He made me look like a really good coach” – Cardiff boss Brian Barry-Murphy gets his chat on with Ben Fisher about the joy of coaching Cole Palmer at Manchester City Under-21s and how he can’t wait to face his old mentor Enzo Maresca when Chelsea come to town in the Fizzy Cup quarter-finals. Need a gift for that special football-obsessed person in your life? Well the Big Website Bookshop has loads of great reads available. You can even just treat yourself. Get shopping here! So Nottingham Forest beat Spurs 3-0 (lol) after Spurs beat West Ham 3-0, in turn, following West Ham beating Nottingham Forest 3-0, which is the Premier League equivalent of an Escher drawing. As Danny Baker used to say, ‘football is chaos’. .. ” – Noble Francis. Is anybody else looking back with fondness to a time when Sepp Blatter was Fifa’s chief suit? ” – Gary Mc Guinness. As a compatriot of Tyler T (Friday’s Football Daily letters), may I add a preemptive global apology for anything Alexi Lalas says? There’s really no excuse. As a people, we should have long ago endeavoured to make sure he never actually speaks into a live microphone. And I’m sorry to Tyler as well for bandwagoning his letter” – Daniel Stauss. Re: rival fans being nice (Football Daily letters passim) – my friend, a lifelong Coventry fan, asked me to join him at the Spurs v Coventry FA Cup final in 1987. Unfortunately he could only get tickets in the middle of a Tottenham section. Notwithstanding this he wore his Coventry scarf and we both were on our feet cheering when Coventry equalised, without any adverse reaction from the Spurs fans. Not only that, after Coventry won the match – and the Cup – the Spurs fans remained in their seats and clapped the Coventry team when they came round celebrating their win. Those were the days” – Danny Sullivan. Send letters to the. boss@theguardian. com. Today’s prizeless letter o’ the day winner is … Danny Sullivan. Terms and conditions for our competitions, when we run them, can be viewed here. This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
