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.