Let me return very briefly to the so-called great debate, the one we had online and on the podcast the other night with one of the board defenders from X.

He posed the question of what the best thing the Celtic board has done in the last ten years was, and I said unequivocally the hiring of Brendan Rodgers. But let’s be honest, we know there is another answer I could have given.

And the answer is this: the sacking of Wilfried Nancy after only eight games.

Because without that decision, there is no title last season.

The reason I don’t regard it as such a success, or such a major plus point for the board, is that they hired him in the first place. They gave him those eight games, and but for those eight games, we don’t win a double. We win a treble.

But the sacking of Nancy is definitely one of the most important things to happen at Celtic in the last decade, because it showed that there is a line even this board is not willing to let us cross. These are the decisions you have to get right.

Even more than hiring is the firing.

Because you can make a mistake with hiring.

It happens all the time. A club will hire a manager who comes in and does not understand the place, does not understand the culture, does not understand the requirements, does not agree with the philosophical style of play, or does not understand that certain club favourites are deserving of respect.

Maybe the dressing room does not like the guy. Maybe the dressing room does not agree with what he wants to change. Maybe he is overwhelmed by the size of the place, or by the expectation level.

There are many reasons why it can fail.

But it is a bad board, a very bad board, that digs in its heels and keeps going with a guy who is obviously done for.

And there are broadly three reasons why boards do that. All of them are psychological.

The first is that they do not want to look stupid.

So, they risk campaigns. They risk tens of millions of pounds of club money simply because they do not want to admit that they got the original decision wrong.

Secondly, there are some who genuinely believe they have the right guy and that time will prove them correct.

But if it is one of those hires which simply does not fit the club, that is hope with no prospect of success.

And then there is the third group.

They are the most dangerous of all. They are the ones who refuse to give in to the mob.

A manager suffers some bad results. They put that down to teething problems. Then they look at the behaviour of supporters and pundits, and they vow not to give in.

Any combination of those three is dangerous.

And our board, which has been guilty in the past of digging in its heels in the face of fan opposition, which has been guilty of making wasteful decisions and not immediately reversing them, and which has on occasion believed that everyone deserves more time while backing its own judgement in the face of evidence, actually did the right thing for once.

If you look at English football right now, there is an obvious example, and it is Manchester United. Michael Carrick looks like a walking disaster.

You can see very clearly that there is very little hope of him turning things around. He already looks and sounds like a man who is doomed. And whatever reason that club has for hanging on to him, even if it is something as simple as its directors believing that they cannot just keep sacking managers willy-nilly ad infinitum and expect to get away with it, it is obvious that they are putting off doing what has to be done.

They are finding all sorts of phoney-baloney justifications for delaying the inevitable.

And that is exactly the danger I am talking about. There comes a point when refusing to act is not patience. It is simply cowardice dressed up as prudence.

And there’s an example right here in Scotland, and the example is not in Glasgow.

The example is in Aberdeen and today, an Aberdeen team shorn of confidence and suffering multiple injuries will travel to Hampden to play the Ibrox club in the League Cup semi-final.

This is the year for a non-Glasgow club to be confident of winning that tournament. St Mirren, of course, won it last season against us in the final. But that was an unexpected result. This season, nobody would be especially surprised if a club from outside Glasgow got its hands on the trophy.

And there are two clubs which would benefit more than most: Aberdeen and Hearts.

Hearts, I still think, have a very good chance of winning it. In fact, I have predicted that Hearts will win it. But under normal circumstances, Aberdeen in a semi-final would be a team you would be wary of.

Today, the Ibrox club won’t be. Because Aberdeen appointed Stephen Robinson earlier this year, and it increasingly looks as though that decision is going to end in tears.

Everyone can see the direction of travel already, and they are leaving him in place.

So, a cup semi-final which, under normal circumstances, would offer your side a genuine shot at silverware has, in my view, almost been surrendered before the game even kicks off.

You always hope that one day one of these clubs is going to act ruthlessly in its own best interests. And yet so often they dither and delay over decisions which, in reality, should be relatively straightforward.

I look at that game tonight and I see very little reason for optimism for any Aberdeen supporter. Looking around social media, I find very little enthusiasm amongst them for the game either.

They all seem to believe that the present management team is not up to the job.

And the club, on some level, must know that the likely direction of travel is the sacking of this guy within weeks, and certainly within months.

It may even be that the result at Hampden tonight is so severe that they do it within the next 24 hours. But as their supporters are already well aware, and as some of them have already said, that will be a day late and a dollar short, as usual.

You know, we hired Wilfried Nancy, and we gave him a cup final to open with.

That, in hindsight, is one of the most spectacular mistakes we have ever made in our history. A grotesque act of shooting ourselves in the foot.

And I am more and more convinced that it was done to make him look good, to give him the chance to win silverware in his first game.

Because if you do that in your first match, the sky is the limit beyond that. People will expect more. People will demand greatness.

And instead, it was a disaster. It cost us silverware. And that is why I cannot give the board full marks for the decision to sack him when they did.

They should not have hired him when they did. They should not have given him a major match at Hampden as his introduction to the supporters.

Because there are two ways that can go.

It is either a sweeping success which gets you off to the best possible start, or it is a catastrophic failure which leaves everyone wondering whether those running the club have taken leave of their senses.

But I will say it again. This board showed a rare capacity for recognising that it had made a mistake, and a ruthlessness in correcting that mistake, which is uncharacteristic of Celtic as a whole. It is one of the best things we have done in the last decade, but it came on the heels of one of the stupidest.

And so, I cannot, in all conscience, cite it as an unqualified success.

But Stephen Robinson is already cloaked in failure.

You could take that guy out of the equation right now and put almost anyone else in, and I think that person would have a better chance of getting a result tonight than Robinson does.

I am absolutely convinced of it.

I do, of course, wish Aberdeen well. I hope for it, but I do not expect it. And in the aftermath, a lot of the conversation is going to be: why didn’t they sack the guy sooner?

It is a question football fans all over this country can relate to.

And it may have been the one question the board at Celtic got absolutely right, because Nancy lasted only eight games, and we sacked him not a moment too soon.

Because if he stays another week and drops more points, we do not win last season’s title.

There is the lesson. And that is one of their few genuine successes.

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