Today I’m in no mood to sugar-coat it.
Ronny Deila is blowing it.
His latest bizarre bit of behaviour is the way he’s reversed himself on the red card to Dedryck Boyata, who he threw to the wolves just the other night.
I am fed up with this.
He said after the game on Sunday that he’d already had time to re-watch the incident and he was convinced it was a red card. Today, whilst still criticising the player, he’s reversed his view that it was a sending off so that Celtic can appeal the decision.
I am flabbergasted by this. It makes a mockery of our whole club.
Today, at least one journalist will be eating his words as a consequence of this baffling and infuriating change of heart. Matthew Lindsay, writing in The Herald today, said Deila had shown a “touch of class” in the way he handled this incident after the game; what does Lindsay think he looks like now?
Like someone who’s indecisive at best.
So what happened here?
If Deila’s watched this a few times since Sunday and has changed his mind on account of what he saw after repeated viewings then it’s all well and good, but Celtic don’t have a leg to stand on in the appeal. How is he going to get a decision reversed when he was of the mind, after already re-watching it, that the ref got it right? How’s he going to convince an SFA panel that some kind of miscarriage of justice has been done when his initial public statements are to the contrary?
The best thing for him to have done was to have kept his mouth shut after the game, said he hadn’t seen the incident properly and waited for a proper look. Instead we got a knee-jerk reaction, doubtless seen as a way to deflect attention from another abject display. At the same time, once he’d made that statement he should have stuck with it, especially as the initial comments make an appeal a long shot prospect at best.
A week ago he appeared to backtrack on James Forrest.
Today we’ve heard that Tom Rogic is stalling on a new deal, and how it seems to have frozen him out of Deila’s plans. If Rogic is one of the players Deila is talking about leaving at the end of the season we would be entitled to be furious; he’s been superb and looks like a player of the year candidate.
He has made overtures to Forrest.
He has made none to the Australian and that too reveals a lack of consistency and common sense.
A manager who constantly changes his tune like this appears indecisive and weak. Add this to his tactical inflexibility, indecipherable team selections and a squad building plan which looks like a paint-by-numbers done by a primary school class which has had too much sugar and I am now forced to write words I never thought I would.
Ronny Deila is grossly unfit for, and unsuited to, the manager’s job at Celtic Park.
He has to go, pure and simple.
Replacing him has become an imperative.
It is not a matter of it, but when.