Celtic fans waving season books at Nicholson and Lawwell are right to be raging because they've seen this movie before

Celtic fans waving season books at Nicholson and Lawwell are right to be raging because they've seen this movie before

The Hoops will head to Kazakhstan with their European hopes in the balance following the first leg draw with Kairat

Peter Lawwell and Michael Nicholson

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me more than 10 times – that’s just shameful all round.

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There will be plenty of Celtic fans feeling a bit foolish right now for thinking their team had more than enough to be heading to Kazakhstan next week with a healthy lead and one foot in the Champions League.

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But those punters fell for it all again.

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Instead, Celtic are heading 3,500 miles across the world with their backside hanging out once more.

Brendan Rodgers’ side might pull this one out of the fire. The tie is at 0-0 and Kairat looked nothing more than a big, solid, well organised outfit.

The odds are heavily stacked against them. No Scottish side has ever won in Kazakhstan and the logistics of it all means teams are practically two down before a ball is kicked.

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So here we are again with Celtic. On the verge of a Champions League calamity.

And while some might have been fooled into believing it’ll all turn out okay in the end, plenty have been seeing the warning signs – because they’ve been trapped in this movie before.

No wonder the board copped it. At one stage an angry punter marched up to the edge of the press box, waving his season ticket book at Michael Nicholson and Peter Lawwell.

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It probably cost the guts of 800 quid and the irony was his match brief for Wednesday would have cost an extra 30 bucks at least.

It won't have been nice for the chief exec and chairman to get an ear bashing – but the guy had a right to be raging.

As a club Celtic act like these qualifiers have been hiding in a cupboard before hopping out with a scare mask on in the middle of the night.

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Yet every single time they scream the place down and jump out of their jammies.

You could try to write off Wednesday night as some kind of bad day at the office but it would be wilful blindness.

Celtic are serial offenders when it comes to being ill-prepared for these crucial showdowns.

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Get this. Celts have faced 18 of these do-or-die shootouts to get to the Champions League group stages.

They’ve lost 11 of them. Eleven.

They've scraped through in seven.

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Take out Arsenal a few years back and the rest aren’t exactly a who’s who of European football. More like a who’s that?

Artmedia, Maribor, Malmo, Cluj, Ferencvaros, Midtjylland were all disasters.

Failure in Almaty on Tuesday would be the worst of the lot.

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And the worst thing for Celtic fans is that it’s all self-inflicted.

They regularly collapse at these staging posts because they haven’t been prepared.

Even the ones they did survive, like Be’er Sheva and Astana, was in spite of the business done rather than because of it, stumbling into the groups with cobbled together defences and names that are never seen again once the transfer window shuts.

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Celtic have had practically a free run at the Champions League for 15 years and yet done precious little with it.

Daizen Maeda at full-time (Image: SNS Group)

Fans are raging this week because they know all this. They’ve seen it all before. They’ve been screaming for signings for months because they knew trouble was coming down the pipeline.

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Rodgers has been practically begging for help in recent weeks. He’s been like a hostage holding up a copy of the day’s newspaper and asking folk to sense the ransom.

Listen, the performance in the first 45 minutes against Kairat wasn’t good enough regardless of the backdrop.

There was a £9m striker who spent less time in the box than the Almaty physio. An £11m midfielder who couldn’t get a start, along with a £6m defender on the bench.

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Mistakes have been made by everyone.

But take a look at that finishing line up and surely the Celtic board can understand why punters are fuming at being left behind the eight ball again.

It was a shambles. There were so many round pegs in square holes it was like closing time at the local nursery.

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You were half expecting stand-in left back Liam Scales to pull off a mask and reveal it was actually Nir Bitton all along.

Chucking on the likes of Yang – who was out the door four weeks ago – and asking him to change the game was embarrassing.

Throwing on Shin Yamada – who might be one of the strangest signings in the club’s history – on a salvage mission was shocking.

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No harm to Yamada, but this is a guy who is 25 year-old and has made less than 100 appearances as a pro.

That’s not a hopeful punt. It’s a cry for help. Like Rodgers has been doing.

He mentioned going to Rosenborg a few years ago after a 0-0 at Parkhead in the qualifiers.

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It was a fair point. The first leg of that one Rodgers had no striker with Moussa Dembele injured and Leigh Griffiths suspended.

And who played up front? James Forrest. Of course he did.

Seven years on he’s still the In Case of Emergency Break Glass guy. Except now he’s 34 and hasn’t started so many games in a row for about five seasons.

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Hoops fans would laugh if it wasn’t so serious.

Celtic will do their usual and wait until the last week of the window and then pick up some decent players who are surplus to requirements at fairly high level clubs.

It’s how they got the likes of Jota, Cameron Carter-Vickers and Matt O’Riley, and it will be enough to make them odds on to retain the title.

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But it’s not a cohesive transfer strategy. It's a blind man at an orgy.

They could get out of jail next week but the harsh reality staring them in the face is Celts could be out Champions League could be up the lum by that stage the recruits arrive.

And that wouldn’t just be foolish – it would be shameful.

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