Articles

To Understand How Lucky We Got With Brendan, Look At Who We Might Have Had

|
Image for To Understand How Lucky We Got With Brendan, Look At Who We Might Have Had

Football management is an increasingly difficult business. That’s not even up for debate. The pressure these guys are under is enormous. Even bosses whose jobs should be relatively safe can feel the walls closing in on them.

Take Gordon Strachan, for example.

He’s a guy who should have been riding high. He’s in a job he loves, where expectations aren’t exactly through the roof. He commands tremendous loyalty from the fans, who know he gets them and what it means to be Scotland boss. But he’s floundering right now, because even the Tartan Army demands more than they’re getting at the present time, and his team selections are baffling to say the least.

Jackie McNamara parted company with York City today. That’s surprised precisely nobody who’s been following events at that club, or his career trajectory. In fact, back when Ronny Deila was appointed Celtic manager I spoke to a couple of fans who, whilst understandably asking questions about who our new boss was, were simply glad that it hadn’t gone to the then Dundee Utd manager who so many in the media seemed to think was in the running.

As Paul67 over on CQN has said, Jackie was the architect of his own destruction over there, and as such a move to Celtic Park was never even remotely likely. There are others who would have had a fighting chance, and who would have led us down the wrong path.

Malky Mackay is one of them, out of work now for well over a year, after Wigan sacked him in April of 2015. According to some reports, he actually talked to Celtic when the vacancy came up in the summer. It would have been a shocking appointment; MacKay’s career is probably never going to recover from the racism story which swallowed him up after he left Cardiff, but his record was never as good as some represented it in the first place.

His one contribution to our summer of fun was to tell the world he had a plan for winning ten in a row. Big deal, as I said at the time. Ronny Deila would have been well placed to do the same, and if that was the limit of MacKay’s ambition he had none.

Paul Lambert is another out of work boss who had a shot, and as I said at the time I would not have wept had he found himself in the post. I always liked Lambert, always admired him as a man, a footballer and as a manager. He had the right ideas, including about how the game should be played, and it wouldn’t have been an out and out disaster had he got it. But it would have sold us short; he would never have been on my list of first choices, simply the best bet on the list of the second class. That’s not enough for a club like Celtic.

Owen Coyle is another with friends in the media, and a guy who some say would have made their A List. He went to Blackburn, where Lambert had been, and has found himself already in freefall, with four wins out of sixteen games. Eight of them have ended in defeat. Rovers once considered themselves an EPL team who were slumming it in a lower league; this season they’ll be lucky if they don’t find themselves in a relegation dogfight.

This isn’t all Coyle’s fault; Blackburn have never been the team many of their fans thought they were.

Built on crazy money, bankrolled by one of the first English top flight sugar daddies, they were never more than a small town team with ideas above their station. Coyle couldn’t have turned the ship around anymore than Lambert managed to. His CV lacks anything of real distinction; this guy is mediocrity writ large. He would never have led us to a performance like we saw at Celtic Park a fortnight ago, not with all the money in the world.

Nor would the string of other B List bosses who are out there, and who are united only by the uninspiring football they preside over. I would have had little faith in most of them, and would have been bitterly disappointed had they been named.

But there is, of course, one manager who’s name would have given Celtic fans belief and reason for optimism, and he was my second choice for the hot-seat after Brendan. I refer, of course, to David Moyes, a man who’s managerial career has been on the downslope since he left Everton. I’ve always argued he should have been given more time at Manchester United, but be that as it may, he appears to be on a catastrophic freefall right now.

It’s difficult to know what has gone so wrong for Moyes, but it’s now beyond denying that he’s struggling to recover his position in the game. He still commands wide respect across the sport but that’s getting harder to sustain and if the Sunderland experiment ends in failure – as seems entirely, and horribly, likely – then there’ll be little left of the promise that saw him elevated to the job at Old Trafford, with a recommendation from Ferguson himself.

He has not won one of his seven league games in charge. That is disastrous form. They are bottom of the EPL, which is even worse. Managers don’t get time in that league; there’s too much money at stake for a club like Sunderland to wait and see.

Neither could Celtic. With those Champions League qualifiers to play, we required someone capable of making an instant start, with an immediate impact. Brendan didn’t just meet that standard but he has exceeded it by quite a ways.

His performance so far has been nearly perfect; the results and performances in Israel and Barcelona notwithstanding.

This is why it was imperative for us to go out there and bring in the best, and that’s what we did.

When you consider what we might have ended up, it’s a damned good job that we did.

In Brendan We Trust.

Share this article