Let's start by focusing on the scale of Celtic’s latest achievement. That’s the way Ange Postecoglou would prefer it after all and, to be fair, the big Aussie has a point.
Yes, this club may have made a habit of throwing around Trebles like confetti over the past few years but that should not detract from the here and now of another domestic clean sweep.
On the contrary, Postecoglou’s second campaign in charge fully deserves to be viewed in splendid isolation and recognised for the outstanding success that it has been. His Celtic haven’t just swept the rest away, they have relentlessly monstered the opposition from start to finish. And they have done so with a swashbuckling style which has Postecoglou’s signature written all over it.
The side that he has built has proven to be unstoppable. In that respect, he has been as good as his word. “We never stop,’ was how he put it when he first walked in through the door as a relatively unknown quantity. ‘We can’t be stopped,’ is how it has started to feel over the two years since.
Inverness Caley Thistle tried their utmost to disprove that theory at the weekend but although the Highlanders threw the kitchen sink at it at Hampden on Saturday the truth of the matter is Billy Dodds and his players didn’t stand a chance.
They huffed and puffed with all of their might but no amount of perspiration was ever going to get in the way of Postecoglou presenting Celtic’s supporters with the perfect parting gift, if that’s what this latest piece of silverware ultimately proves to be.
At the age of 57, it’s taken him some time to reach this crossroads in his career but all points now lead to the Premier League and Postecoglou’s reluctance to say anything meaningful in the immediate aftermath of this triumph spoke volumes by itself.
Last week, on these pages, we revealed how his adviser, Frank Trimboli, was about to emerge as a key player in the process which would ultimately determine Postecoglou’s next step.
Suffice to say, Trimboli’s influence inside the command centre at Tottenham Hotspur has now been well and truly wielded and his golden goose of a client is about to be invited into Daniel Levy’s inner sanctum for a life changing conversation.
This, after all, is a chairman who previously signed off on a contract worth a reputed £15m a year when he tempted Antonio Conte into the manager’s position. It may have been an expensive mistake but Levy has lived and learned.
With a little help from Trimboli he has identified Postecoglou as his preferred candidate for the job of making Spurs a lot less Spursy from here on in. Anyone who has examined the body of evidence Postecoglou looks set to leave behind in Glasgow’s east end, would be compelled to conclude that this seems like a shrewd bit of thinking from the man in charge.
And, ironically, this is precisely where Celtic’s supporters can take some solace in the teary eyed event that Postecoglou does end up breaking their hearts and taking ‘his football’ with him to north London. It was their own chairman, Peter Lawwell, who was smart enough to take a risk on bringing Postecoglou into the UK in the first place, at a time when his own reputation was being trashed by the club’s supporters.
The appointment was one of Lawwell’s last acts as chief executive before he effectively left out of the back door with his head under a blanket after being blamed for the loss of 10 in a row in what was one of the most jaw droppingly appalling displays of entitlement in the history of the game.
That he is back at the helm at this particular moment as the club’s chairman is a blessing for which Celtic’s people ought to be thankful. It’s no coincidence, after all, that their club is currently rewriting all manner of history books.
Yes, Postecoglou may have steamrollered his way to five trophies out of the six that have been available to him since he first agreed to take on the task which made Eddie Howe’s feet turn cold.
But, as perfect as Postecoglou has been, this hasn’t been some freakish sudden spike in Celtic’s success. Rather it has been the continuation of Lawwell’s iron fisted approach to keeping his club at the top of the SPFL’s pile.
It’s actually quite extraordinary to consider that this latest clean sweep constitutes a world record eighth domestic treble, when five of them have been clocked up in the last seven years.
In fact, Celtic have scooped up 17 of the last 21 trophies over that seven year period of sustained superiority. It hasn’t happened by accident or because they got lucky where Postecoglou’s appointment was concerned.
And there’s another irony in this story which is worthy of a footnote, now Postecoglou’s future is set to be decided. It was Brendan Rodgers who launched this whole trophy sweep in the first place and it’s the Irishman who remains next in the running for the Spurs job as far as the bookies are concerned.
Rodgers has also been mentioned as the man best qualified to take over from Postecoglou at Parkhead, which does not seem like a bad idea even if there are some supporters who still can’t quite find it within themselves to forgive him for leaving for Leicester when he did. That lingering animosity and hostility is likely to stymie any potential return as Rodgers is well aware of the anger he left behind.
And he won’t save Celtic at the other end either by unexpectedly pipping Postecoglou to the post at Tottenham because, having already knocked back Levy’s advances twice before, Rodgers does not expect to be asked for a third time.
On the contrary, the 50-year-old is currently planning to take a year out of the firing line after losing his job at panic stricken Leicester and, whenever he is good and ready to return, Rodgers may look to scratch an old itch by managing somewhere abroad.
All of which means Lawwell and chief executive Michael Nicholson will have to get their thinking caps on if they do end up with a Postecoglou shaped hole in the Parkhead dugout in the coming days.
And yet recent history suggests the club’s future will remain in safe hands regardless.
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