This time last week, I was feeling pretty fed up after watching a dull-as-dishwater 0-0 draw with Rosenborg at home.
It was the kind of flat display Brendan’s teams don’t usually produce. On Saturday I watched delightedly as we blew away Sunderland with a dazzling performance and a rain of goals, and I was optimistic about last night as a result.
At no point, even last week, did I think we would go out. I had expected a better performance in the second leg than in the first. I had expected Brendan to try to outfox them with tactics, and he sort of did, but not in the way I expected.
Last night I became aware of two things about this Celtic team which I never expected to see this early in Brendan’s tenure. (People tend to forget he’s only been here a year; a hell of a good one, but a year nonetheless.)
First is the mental toughness they have. I don’t know why last night was the best evidence of that, but to me it was. This team is strong in mind. They don’t rattle under pressure. That’s something I’ve not seen from a Celtic side in a long, long time.
Brendan has got them believing. In themselves, in him, in each other.
That’s an amazing thing.
Brendan has come to us with a certain skill-set which no manager in our history has possessed. I know what part of his secret is, and the amazing thing is that it’s not a secret at all. He has knowledge in a key area which is a little unusual, and definitely misunderstood.
Because of that, its utility is hugely underestimated.
For five years he studied neurolinguistics.
It’s not a new field of knowledge but it’s still one that few properly understand.
It came to prominence in a slightly odd way; in the field of dating, believe it or not, and was first popularised in a book called The Game, by a guy named Neil Strauss.
It’s about the somewhat seedy world of the pick-up artist.
The book is uniformly awful, describing pretty horrible people and their pretty horrible world, but it’s a world Strauss, a former Rolling Stone writer, came to dominate.
But before him there was Ross Jeffries.
Jeffries was the first grand wizard of the pick-up artists, and for a while he made his living giving seminars on how he did it. In the front row of those seminars would be the desperados who paid $150 a pop to learn how to meet women … but in the back row would be sharp suited types from the fields of business, politics, finance, law enforcement, intelligence and even the military. They all had their own uses for Jeffries’ techniques.
And eventually, of course, sport got in on it too.
NLP is about how language influences the brain, and how by saying certain things in a certain way you can sort of re-wire the brains of other people. It sounds barmy, right? But Ross Jeffries tumbled onto a way to use it to pick up women, and others have turned it into a high-powered tool for making deals, and cops have used it to build rapport with suspects and elicit confessions … and in sport people have used it to turn lily-livered bottlers into winners.
And Brendan wasn’t an amateur, playing at this stuff.
Five years of study?
That’s somebody who takes it seriously, and knows his business.
So that mental toughness in the Celtic team, that’s certainly been a factor in how the magic has worked. That’s helped, and no doubt about it.
But the second thing is just as important, the tactical discipline that went into last night’s game. And you could see it, in flashes, last year.
There were a lot of matches last season where Brendan basically came out in the papers after games and told us we had to re-evaluate what we were seeing on the park. My old man has a particular dislike for the way we sometimes seem to slacken off in games, playing the ball backwards and from man to man, in no particular hurry to drive up the pitch.
Brendan knew exactly what that was about though; those players are simply following his own instructions. That side-ways passing, that playing the ball behind them, that’s what top teams do to retain possession, hoping it will draw the opposition out and towards them. We tried it at Celtic Park and were frustrated because Rosenborg had their own tactical discipline and refused to commit, but last night we knew they couldn’t keep that up, they were the home team, and Brendan realised if we kept passing the ball, keeping possession, daring them to come at us, that eventually they would … and then we’d get in behind them. Which we did.
This was an astonishingly good display, away from home, where the media likes to remind us that we sometimes struggle.
We didn’t struggle last night. We looked in no danger at all, at any point in the proceedings. This is a team with a different mentality to the one it had 12 months ago, when we endured a nervy final qualifying game in Israel.
Should we draw the same team again this year, I do not expect us to look anywhere near as shaky in the home straight.
We’re in good shape here.