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The Football Show · 8 October 2026
"How are you going to sack the board? You're not." The Journos on why Dermot Desmond will leave Celtic only when he decides to.
Who on Celtic's board is man enough to pick up the bat phone and tell Desmond not to do something? On the evidence of the club's Saturday-night statement, nobody. The tennis-ball protest at St Andrews was "isolated, stupid, shouldn't have happened", but the reaction turned it into a PR own goal. Peter Martin asks whether protest is sometimes people's last option, and the answer comes back: "Dermot Desmond will go from Celtic when Dermot Desmond wants to go from Celtic", and getting up his nose only makes him more entrenched.
Transcript:
Who's picking up the bat phone and saying to him, this is what you should do?
Oh, it's Dermot, of course.
No, but that's what I'm saying to you. Who's picking up the bat phone? Non-executive directors, or indeed chief executives? Is anybody man enough to pick it up and say, by the way, don't do this?
Well, the Saturday night statement would answer your question there.
Nobody. Exactly. There's just no argument about your question there. If you isolate it, it's a black-trackie-fest jaunt to Fife, right? Isolated, stupid, shouldn't have happened. Nobody should have to endure that playing golf. But the reaction, it implodes. It creates a big, massive...
You're right. It's a PR own goal.
In life, though, Gordon, and I don't want to expand it into what I would consider more serious situations, but in life sometimes the protest, whether it be against governments, whether it be against policies, whether it be against people who have been involved in scurrilous things: if you can't get to them, you use... and you've seen it in life down through the years, you've seen protests, you see it now on the streets of Paris and across France with regards to education. Sometimes people do things which are out of left field because it's their last option.
Absolutely. Absolutely. But you've got to look at the strategy and you say, right, what is our endgame? And the endgame is, everybody goes, sack the board. Okay, right, we sack the board. Get rid of Dermot. All right, get rid of Dermot Desmond. So how are you going to get rid of Dermot Desmond? How are you going to sack the board? You're not. Dermot Desmond will go from Celtic when Dermot Desmond wants to go from Celtic. It is that simple. And by the way, when Dermot Desmond goes from Celtic, maybe Ross Desmond stays at Celtic. So if you go on, your strategy has got to be: how do you manoeuvre Desmond into a position where he wants to go from Celtic? I would say, in my limited knowledge of the man, to get up his nose is not the best way to go about it, because I would think his track record shows that he would be absolutely more defiant and more entrenched, and would not want to be seen to be pressurised. That's my view.
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