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Of all the people the media should be staying away from when it comes to critiqueing Ronny Deila’s time at Celtic Park, Ally McCoist should be near the top of the list.
Most Celtic fans accept that Ronny is struggling this season, and that his plans for the team do not seem to be going over. His tactical inflexibility means we get found out more often than we’d like. Even when we win, we don’t always play particularly well.
The media thinks it sees some connection between our manager’s situation and that which engulfed the ageing, balding media darling at Ibrox. They see, perhaps, some kinship between the two in the way in which Ronny has failed to win over the fans and the way in which McCoist wound up loathed by those Sevco supporters who grew up worshiping him in a Rangers shirt.
I found his comments yesterday to be patronising and disingenuous. Not only were they an attempt to have a poke at Celtic and our supporters, but they were also a not-too-subtle offer of an alibi for his own abject failings in the dugout.
Those failings, on the pitch, far exceeded those of our manager, but they weren’t the only difference between the two.
These are five reasons why the comparison is lousy and why McCoist should shut his mouth and save the sympathy, possibly for the next chairman daft enough to offer him a job … unless that job is mopping the halls and the dressing room floor.
1) Deila came to Celtic having already won a league and cup elsewhere. His career is just getting started. McCoist’s is just about finished.
The media doesn’t like to be reminded of this, but Ronny Deila arrived at Celtic Park already a league and cup winner.
Yes, he did it in unfashionable, unsexy Norway, but he did it with an unfancied team who he utterly transformed and made into winners.
You know what else?
He did it at an age when Kenny Miller is still playing football and by the time he was 40 he’d added an SPL title and a League Cup to his personal trophy haul.
By the time this season finishes he’ll have another league championship and a Scottish Cup to pad out the CV.
If the board does decide to part with him he’ll be young enough not to worry about watching the best years of his career spent in the ignominy of scouring the Situations Vacant ads for work.
Ally McCoist took over the Rangers job when he was almost 50, having never managed a professional club in his career.
His two lower league titles (and no cups, by the way) are not the stuff dreams are made of for chairmen of ambitious football teams.
When Sevco was told to start life in the lower leagues I made a confident, some said bold, prediction which I was never in any doubt about; that Ally McCoist would never again manage a top flight team, anywhere in football. Not even Norway.
So far, not even Kilmarnock have moved to prove that prediction wrong.
2) The manner in which Ronny leaves Celtic is sure to be very different from the way that MCoist parted company with Sevco.
When Ronny Deila arrived at Parkhead it’s fair to say that no more than a handful of our supporters knew who he was.
We wanted to like him, and most of us still do. For all the criticism of Ronny the Manager, Ronny the Man is a guy we all have tremendous affection for. The board might come to accept that the fit just isn’t right, but Ronny will retain their enormous respect and they will fashion for him an exit that gives him his due.
He didn’t arrive at Parkhead “one of us”, but he will leave that way.
McCoist, in contrast, took over at a club where he was already a legend and almost revered by the supporters.
During his time at Ibrox, he infuriated the fans so much with an inherent selfishness and arrogance few could believe, and a penchant for grubbing up money at a time when the club could ill afford it, that he left something of a hate figure to the very people who once held him in such esteem.
And worse than all that, his behaviour neither allowed for, nor was he given, the respect and dignity of a “mutual consenting.”
In fact, so keen were his club to get rid of him, they agreed to let him stuff himself every afternoon in the park, on full pay, rather than allow him near the dugout.
When a skint football club is so pissed off with you that they’d rather pay you a salary to stay the hell away from the place … man oh man, you must really reek as a boss.
3) Ronny was batting against a negative media from the day he arrived here. McCoist had a fawning, sycophantic one until the day he left.
Even when you take into consideration Ronny’s vastly better managerial record and achievements, the greatest gulf between the bosses comes in the way they’ve been portrayed by a Scottish media which has no sense of perspective, no knowledge of football beyond these borders, no willingness to learn or hear anything new and a bias which permeates every debate and discussion.
They also have their mates and their favourites and most of them hailing from one club.
It’s no exaggeration to say that for the time he was at Ibrox that McCoist was easily the most feted, slobbered over, over-rated and under-scrutinised manager on this island.
No other boss, north or south of the border, got such an easy – some would say free – ride from the media who’s jobs were to be objective and give an honest appraisal of matters.
Even in the dying embers of his Ibrox career, there was an unspoken, but nevertheless official, media policy of not discussing, for even a second, any potential candidate for his job. On the few occasions when someone broke protocol they were accused of insensitivity and lack of respect.
Only when he had tested the patience of his employers to destruction did the papers fill with a flurry of names; Billy Davies, Stuart McCall, Terry Butcher and the rest.
Contrast this with the recent treatment meted out to our own boss.
Such was the media’s attitude towards McCoist that Hugh Keevins, on Radio Clyde, once summed up the general feeling of his colleagues by admitting, on the air, that none of them were capable of being objective even if they wanted to be because “Ally” was their pal.
Ronny arrived in Scotland with no friends or allies in the press.
He tried, at first, to get some but he must have realised early that it wasn’t going to happen.
Many of them had their pencils sharpened and ready to stick in his back the moment he got off the plane; they’ve been poking him with them ever since, regardless of how well our team was doing at the time.
The aforementioned Keevins wrote his first negative editorial before Deila had even managed a single game, stating, on the day before the deal was officially sealed, that Ronny’s behaviour at Strømsgodset, where he stripped down to his boxers and did push ups on the pitch to celebrate their title win, was “unbecoming of a Celtic manager.”
So it was personal, and from a very early stage.
No other manager in the history of this country has ever had to endure such negativity from an overwhelmingly hostile media.
Unless you include Neil Lennon, Wim Jansen, Tony Mowbray, Jo Venglos and anyone else appointed Celtic manager and who would have hesitated to sue.
4) Ronny is a well travelled “student of football.” McCoist is a homeboy who knows where the best Greggs in Scotland is.
That sounds flippant, but it’s actually a very real criticism of McCoist, who’s “football knowledge” was all learned in one place, at the knee of Walter Smith, one of the most negative, and lucky, managers in the history of football who’s one experience outside the gilded protection of Ibrox ended in ignominy and sacking at Everton, who he would have got relegated but for the appointment of David Moyes, who steered them to safety.
McCoist learned nothing new in the course of his career.
His style of football – the long punt up the park – remained almost identical from the first moment he took the job until the hour of his departure.
He’s learned nothing since, choosing not to re-engage with football, but instead to apparently spend much of his time mooching about the local media offices, hoping to get a few words in the papers.
Ronny Deila has tried to learn from other managers and visited other clubs in an effort to educate himself on the latest training techniques and medical and psychological benefits to players.
He’s studied the youth setups at some of the biggest clubs in world football, and believes in a combined approach that binds the development of new players with improving the skills of current ones.
Once again, perhaps this isn’t a style that suits Scottish football; perhaps that’s more our problem than his, so it hasn’t worked here … but no-one can say this is a guy who lets things stand still.
I predict that in the fullness of time even his tactical approach will change in relation to what’s happening elsewhere in football.
He’s a young guy with it all in front of him, after all.
5) Ronny Deila is a Nice Guy, and who he appears to be. McCoist has more faces than a Hall of Mirrors, and most of them pretty ugly ones.
Ronny Deila might not have a lot of friends in the media, but no-one in Scottish football actually loathes the man.
Most accept that he is what he appears to be on the surface; a genuine, decent human being with no hidden agendas, no bitchy attitudes, no arrogance and the utmost respect for other people within the game, even those with whom he disagrees.
Ronny is, in fact, too nice for his own good at times.
There are moments when you wish he had more steel, more grit and self-assurance, that quality that some mistake for arrogance but is actually an essential ingredient in the recipe that turns good managers into great ones.
I sometimes get the impression that Ronny is blown around in the wind somewhat, that he doesn’t always fight his, or our, corner as well as he might.
He hasn’t been fully backed by the Celtic board, he’s reversed himself on a lot of his ideas and opinions and this frustrates us most because it’s clear that some of those ideas are good ones.
McCoist has no such issues.
He is very self confident and aggressive in pursuit of his agendas, whatever they might be. He is ruthless to an often horrifying degree, even when it endangers innocent parties as he did with his “demand” for the names of a judicial panel and his nod and wink to the lunatic fringe in his own support.
He just doesn’t combine this with any discernable talent as a football manager.
On the night of The Shame Game at Celtic Park, he was the clear instigator of the incident on the touchline with Neil Lennon; he then hid behind a wall of others and continued to point his fat finger. His press buddies were on hand to make sure the Celtic boss ate the lions share of the aggro for what happened, including his subsequent four match ban, whilst McCoist himself got away clean.
He did things like this all the time he was at Ibrox; one day he would play the role the media so often ascribed to him, that of the Joker and the Cheeky Chappie … on others, he would be a sneering, spiteful pantomime villain, although that’s never how they portrayed him.
In the end, that’s the memory most of us will have of his time in Scottish football; the vindictive thuggish panderer to and provoker of the hate fuelled lynch mob amongst the Sevco support.
When everything is said and done, these two aren’t just different types of manager, they’re from different ends of the evolutionary scale.
One is a cultured, urbane, sophisticate who is as comfortable giving a motivational speech to Future Leaders as he is in the dugout. The other is a poorly educated yobbish ned from Bellshill, who’s sole gifts in life were skill with a football and a smile and line in patter that got him onto the telly.
But whatever looks he had soon faded.
The hair receded.
The belly grew.
The smile died on the lips of a man who realised his own limitations, and lashed out at those who had more to offer and more to look forward to.
Ally hadn’t been in the papers for a while.
It was nice of them to give him something to do yesterday, and a chance to get his face and his name out there again, for future employers in the English or Scottish lower leagues to ponder.
It’s just as well for him that they did.
Because, you know, I’d almost forgotten he existed at all …