So we go into another international break, another boring wait around for football to recommence. And, like all the others, it will feel interminable.

During it, we will do a lot of talking about what is right with this club and what is wrong with it. We will talk about the manager, the coaching, the squad, the Board, Europe, the title race and everything else that has made this season such an exhausting one.

But more and more, the focus is going to turn towards January.

Towards the January transfer window.

And Celtic supporters are already being told to believe, to have faith, to trust a Board of Directors which has let them down over and over and over and over again.

Eventually, we are going to find out whether they are serious this time, whether the promises are real, whether there actually is a plan to strengthen this team properly, or whether this is simply another exercise in buying time and managing supporter expectations until the window opens, before the usual excuses begin.

I have my own suspicion, and I doubt it will surprise anybody to know what it is.

I like words, as you know. I like working with them, reading them, writing them and occasionally disappearing down completely unnecessary rabbit holes investigating where particular expressions came from.

I’m a geek about this stuff.

And there is one old expression which keeps coming back to me whenever Celtic supporters are told simply to have faith in what this Board says it is going to do.

We’re being asked to buy a pig in a poke.

That phrase has a genuinely old history. It comes from our farming days. A “poke” was simply a bag or sack, and the warning was straightforward: don’t buy something you haven’t properly inspected first.

Don’t hand over your money and trust that what you’ve been promised is actually inside the bag. Open it. Look. Make sure.

Because once you get home, it is too late to discover that what you’ve bought is not what you were told you were buying.

And that seems to me to be an almost perfect description of what Celtic supporters are being asked to do ahead of January.

We’re being shown the sack. We’re being assured there is something worthwhile inside it. We’re being told that this time the club has plans, that this time the recruitment operation is ready, that this time the Board understands what needs to be done.

And we’re being asked not to open the bag until January.

Just trust them. Have faith. Believe.

Given everything that has happened over the last few transfer windows, I’m not sure why anybody thinks Celtic supporters should be willing to buy anything sight unseen ever again.

The problem for the board, of course, is that you cannot fool people forever. Sooner or later, they get the animal home, they open the bag, and they see exactly what is inside.

Which brings us neatly to another expression: letting the cat out of the bag.

Now, the traditional explanation links the two sayings directly. The story goes that an unscrupulous seller might substitute a cat for the pig that was supposedly inside the sack, and the moment the cat leaped out, the deception was exposed.

Whether that really is the historical origin of the phrase is disputed. But as a metaphor for Celtic’s January transfer window, it is almost too perfect.

Because letting the cat out of the bag is the moment when the truth becomes impossible to hide. The moment when the con, if there is one, is revealed. And for Celtic supporters, that moment comes at the end of the transfer window.

By then, the promises will either have been kept or they won’t. The recruitment operation will either have delivered or it won’t. The club will either have addressed the obvious weaknesses in this squad or it will have made excuses for why it could not.

And that is what matters.

So, let’s think about the pig for a moment. What if we get home and discover that we actually got what we wanted? That we went to market, opened the sack and found that what was inside was exactly what we paid for?

What does that look like in Celtic terms?

For me, it starts with the highly mobile defensive midfielder we’ve been looking for for, oh, it feels like about a hundred years. Probably back to the days when people still went to market and bought animals in sacks.

I think it means bringing in a central defender as well.

And you know what? If we’re really stretching it, I’d bring in another midfielder too.

One would be the hard bastard ball-winner. The other would be mobile, aggressive and capable of adding some real physicality to the middle of the park.

Those players are difficult to find. They’re not going to come cheaply.

But we’re going to have to pay anyway. There are only degrees of paying here. Whatever is inside that sack when we finally get it home, there is going to be a price attached to it.

And then there is the other possibility.

What if we open the bag and the cat jumps out?

What does that look like?

For me, it looks like anything short of at least one high-profile, possibly expensive piece of transfer business, alongside proper work on the obvious structural weaknesses in this squad. If we do what we always do, if we dither, delay, wait until the final days of the window and then emerge with another loan deal or some pathetic short-term fix, then we’ll know.

If we come out of January with something designed merely to stick a couple of fingers in the dyke rather than properly plug the holes, then we have learned nothing. And worse than that, we will simply be setting ourselves up for yet another summer of transition.

That would be scandalous. But at least the argument would be over. At least we would know what their word is worth. Some of us reckon we already do.

But there are plenty of people out there still willing to give this Board the benefit of the doubt. And at the end of January, they are going to get their answer too. They are either going to be vindicated or they are going to be humiliated.

Those are the only two options, and so I’m telling you right now: brace yourselves for the moment when we finally open the bag. Because we are not going to know what we’ve got until that transfer window is closed.

This Board does strange things. It leaves critical business until the last minute, and it does that all the time. So until the final day, we are not going to know whether there is some major signing coming, whether there is a serious piece of business about to be done, or whether, God forbid, they are going to sell one of our best players instead.

And when you look at Celtic’s history of selling important players in January, it is not remotely out of the question.

We could. We might. We have before.

And then people are going to have to make up their minds.

Because these people have been explicit in promising that some of these problems will be addressed when the window opens.

Maybe not on the first day. Maybe not even in the first week. But before that month ends, before that window shuts, supporters have been told to expect movement.

Real movement. Forward movement.

And a lot of people are willing to take that on trust.

A lot of people have already paid for the poke.

Now all that remains is to find out what’s inside it.

Choose The CelticBlog as a Preferred Source on Google News…