We Need To Hire A Manager And Leave Him Alone To Lead.
The first managerial appointment of the modern era – the Lawwell era, and we’ll get to him soon enough – was Mowbray; it was a disaster.
The second was Lennon, who had done nothing to suggest that he should be trusted with such a momentous endeavour.
His first full season in charge, the title went to Ibrox.
Rangers repeated our mistake by appointing McCoist.
Two untested managers traded slip-ups until their club went bust.
Lennon, in many ways, is one of the luckiest manager’s in Britain … but we have been over-dependent on whoever was running Ibrox managing to be even more amateurish.
When Lennon left, a combination of feeling the strategy’s glass ceiling hitting him on the head and plain exhaustion at the nature of the job, and smarting about being “offered” an assistant he had never heard of, the job was offered to Keane – who I am glad didn’t take it – but he too was told who his assistant would be.
He turned it down flat, another lucky or God knows how many years we’d have lost.
The club appointed the assistant instead.
The chance to build something early that would leave the fledgling Ibrox operation in the dust was squandered, utterly, as we went with an entirely untested appointment.
I am grateful for the changes Ronny tried to instigate; he laid some of the foundations Rodgers built on, especially as he inherited an unfit shambles of a squad and a managerial operation badly needing dragged into this century, but Deila, although a moderniser, never have the gravitas to sell these ideas to the playing squad, and especially not after Lawwell had quite deliberately call his nuts off by hand-picking John Collins as his babysitter.
The ugliness that provoked had its expression during a lamentable game against Molde.
For the second time in 20 years we didn’t mess about … Desmond flexed his muscles at last and we went out and hired Brendan Rodgers, the very best manager available. For the first year he ran his own shop, utterly, and got everything he wanted. Then the interfering started.
Daniel Arzani was first; it’s where Rodgers should have drawn the line. If he did, he didn’t draw it clearly enough. The third season summer transfer window saw our CEO at his worst, gambling over the managers targets, turning each of them into a game of chicken and we lost them all.
Think on that; we had a top tier manager who identified three key footballers he wanted to take us to the next level.
The CEO was charged with bringing them in … he failed on every one of them.
The John McGinn saga was atrocious. We replaced that blue chip target with a guy who had been released by Kilmarnock and who’d been on free list for months.
In January we upped the ante on insulting the manager by signing a winger he’d never even heard of.
If you want to defend the board for hiring the out of work Lennon as the interim manager go right ahead; I feared the worst and it turned out to be a permanent appointment, made in the showers at Hampden, with the directors induling in an orgy of self-congratulations which looked cynical, shallow and cringey even then and appears far worse now.
We brought in Lennon and then, astonishingly, denied him full control of the football operation.
The consequences of both the decision to appoint him and then the limitations we imposed on him are crystal clear.
The manager needs a free hand with the football operation completely seperate from the rest of the club … within that sphere the head coach will be King.
Which means, of course, that Celtic’s untitled director of football must be cut down first.