Kenny Miller has been a manager for five minutes and won some games in the Scottish League Cup Group Stages, and he already believes he’s a world beater who can come to Celtic Park on opening day, in front of 60,000 fans, and get a result because he’s played against our side lots of times recently and “knows us inside out.”
How many of those games did his team win, incidentally? Oh that’s right. None of them. His talk is only so much bullshit and bluster, and not at all surprising.
His comments are idiotic. “It’s not what they are going to do,” he said, “It’s whether you can put something in place to stop them.”
Which is the amongst the most ignorant nonsense on tactics that I’ve ever heard. Of course it boils down to what we’re going to do; how do you defend against something unless you know what manner of attack is coming your way?
Miller would say that’s the point; in his ego and arrogance he already thinks he knows that. But every battlefield commander knows that the one thing you can count on is an enemy that throws a surprise or two at you. Miller’s comments could be put down to inexperience; I put them down to a fundamental stupidity born of too much time inside Ibrox.
Any tactic based on what the enemy has done previously is ludicrous.
In the aftermath of the Second World War one of the great criticisms levelled at the French high command was that they had based all their military prepositions on the tactics of the First. They refused to accept that war had changed. One of the most notable manifestations of that was that they created the Maginot Line, their “impenetrable” line of bunkers and fortifications which they were sure would hold back the Germans.
A German tank commander, Erich von Manstein, looked at the map, realised that the line didn’t run past the Belgian border and knew that his tanks could make short work of the Ardennes forest. The famous “sickle cut” which split the French and British forces was so perfectly executed that it didn’t take long for France to fall.
Miller has spent too long studying those videos of past pain that he’s not really been watching the matches we’ve been playing lately. The style has changed. The approach is different. The manager has adapted his tactics as any good general should. That was another reason the French lost the war in the west; the German high command was able to improvise, such as when they used gliders and paratroops on the assault they did finally launch against the Maginot defences. This is how decisive engagements are won, and Brendan, knowing this, has spent the whole summer thus far perfecting interchangeable tactics.
The match against Rosenborg – which Miller did actually watch – was a case in point. Brendan saw what was going wrong during the match and he adapted accordingly. If Miller thinks the simplistic nonsense of slapping every man behind the ball is going to cut it here he is off his head. It worked for some teams last season, but this season will be a different story and it only takes one goal to end a game like that … and it won’t just be one of course.
Miller has always been like this, he’s always been an opinionated so-and-so, who thinks that his word is literally gold-plated. He is a mug for talking like this prior to next week’s opener. His Sevco egotism is bursting out of him, and he talks like a man who’s already auditioning for a bigger job than the one he presently has.
We all know what job that is, and based on past history and what we know of Gerrard and his signings thus far, there will be a vacancy there before long.