A Celtic transfer klaxon has sounded and if you listen closely you'll hear Rodgers cracking the whip - Hugh Keevins

If you listen carefully, you might just have heard the sound of a managerial whip being cracked at Celtic Park.

Sead Haksabanovic says he didn’t want to leave Glasgow for Malmo. To be honest, until the news of his transfer broke last week, I had completely forgotten the Montenegrin was still at the club. There’s so much deadwood at Celtic you lose track of the number of players who are surplus to requirements. But Brendan Rodgers has clearly done the inventory – and he’ll decide who’s time is up. Starting with Haksabanovic.

I heard the klaxon, metaphorically speaking, at 6.50pm on Tuesday. Two days had elapsed since Scotland’s demise at Euro 2024. That’s a lifetime if you weren’t interested in what happened in Germany and prefer your football to be of the domestic, not international, kind. The caller on the radio uttered the immortal phrase to the effect that: “The silence from Celtic Park is deafening.”

It is the fans’ time-honoured way of articulating the fact that no new signings so far in the transfer window may be a worrying indication of disaster at hand. This is a state of mind made worse by the publication of the fixture list for next season. Nothing like an Old Firm derby in the opening month of the season to draw attention to the fact that new signings of an appropriately impressive nature are wanted.

I would imagine Rodgers is, above all others, acutely aware of that being the case and has taken matters into his own hands because it’s safer that way. Celtic got away with one last season in a league title race with Rangers that lacked quality on the part of both sides. They won in spite of, rather than because of, transfer dealings that alternated between laudable and laughable.

Rodgers will not want to