Lawwell’s Friendly Journalist Releases A List Of Possible Names For The Celtic Job.

Last night, the Scottish Daily Mail journalist Stephen McGowan, a well-known friend of the crumbling Lawwell regime, released an article on the Lennon situation in which he threw out a series of names, including two he says are actively looking for the job.

It is interesting that someone so close to Lawwell is throwing names out like this; are we to read anything into it? To know the answer to that we have to look at the names themselves.

This is a varied list, and some on it are more likely candidates than others

I think it is well worth considering this as more than just a journalist throwing up possibilities.

This might be our temperature being taken.

They are a mixed bag, from managers whose names have frequently appeared during this saga to others who are perhaps being properly looked at for the first time. Some are obvious. Others not so much.

One, at least, we can – and should – discount entirely, for reasons which I’ll make clear, and which, I fear, the board might see as positives.

Rule nothing in and rule nothing out.

We’ve been here before only to be badly, badly let down by the club with the appointment of Lennon.

Yet we’ve also been here before and ended up with the top drawer, A-List candidate we’d been looking for.

Without further ado, let’s see who McGowan name-checked in the piece.

Steve Clarke: An Obvious Choice

The obvious candidate, and one I promoted in this blog as a potential, stopgap, solution back in November. If we had acted then and offered Clarke the gig I have no doubt that he would have accepted it on an interim basis, and won us the title.

At that point, he’d have been a candidate for getting in on a permanent basis.

But there’s a difference between bringing Clarke in as a stop-gap and giving him the job on a full time basis before he’s had a chance to really prove that he can hack it. Giving Clarke the gig now would not be universally popular; it would be seen as not only a lazy choice but a cheap one.

I think that would be to misunderstand Clarke entirely.

For openers, I don’t think he’s anybody’s yes man and if that was the perception I think it would be quickly challenged and crushed.

I also don’t believe that Clarke would tolerate any interference from the top of the house, or anywhere else. Dissenters wouldn’t get started before they were shipped out.

I think Clarke is well capable of being ruthless.

Clarke is nobody’s fool, and those who have questioned his style of play have, I think, done so from a profound place of misunderstanding as well. He is a brilliant organiser and a canny enough tactician, that I reckon we have no idea at all would Clarke do if he were in charge of an attacking team with the players to make that system work.

What some see as Clarke’s “style” at Killie was, in fact, nothing more than expediency; he was working with a group of players who were limited in many ways and more weeks than not found themselves up against better footballers at bigger clubs.

In short, the style we associate with him – tight, compact, counter attacking, predominantly defensive football – may in fact simply be an adaptation to circumstances … that makes it all the more impressive and makes all the more credible.

I think he has a good shot at it. I think he would bring us success … the question is, is Clarke merely a good manager or a great one never afforded the opportunity to prove it?

Eddie Howe: Miracle Man Of Bournemouth

Of all the candidates we might be interested in, only one of them has won the English League’s Manager Of The Decade award.

And why not?

Because the Miracle of Bournemouth is exactly what it sounds like, a bona fide football rags to riches story.

He took them from the foot of the English professional game – the bottom of League 2 – to the Premier League.

It is astounding. With him at the helm they punched above their weight again and again and again.

The constant cycle of evolving and growing and evolving and growing that it takes to go from the lowest rung of the ladder to the very top is awesome.

He did it in two spells.

During the first he took them from the brink of relegation to the Conference to League One in two seasons. He left for Burnley, but returned a year later to mastermind an even greater feat; two promotions in three years to get them to the EPL.

That’s astounding.

No wonder he won the Manager of the Decade award.

Here’s an even more impressive statistic; he kept them in the EPL for five years.

He has a career win ratio of 41%, which sounds modest and even unimpressive until you consider that for the whole time he has been punching up … making it work with vastly inferior tools to the manager around him.

He is a genuine leader and a guy with the gravitas and experience to make mincemeat of the opposition up here with the tools we can hand him.

More than credible, Howe would be a very good appointment indeed.

Some other club is going to come along eventually and throw money at this guy.

We might have one shot at getting him to sign.

Roy Keane: No, God, Please … No.

Roy Keane is a scary name precisely because it is so plausible, it is so easy to imagine Dermot Desmond deciding what Celtic needs is another Irish manager. It is small-time thinking to a fare-thee-well and precisely the sort of appointment the club needs to avoid.

In my piece on Lennon yesterday I said my biggest problem with his appointment was that it reeked of cronyism, of the board giving the job to him because he’s their pal. A combination of his needed the work and them needing a warm body they could run was the reason he got it, nothing to do with football. This would carry the same stench.

No, Keane would not be a yes man.

He would not have worked within Lawwell’s restricted sphere, and it is hard to imagine many in the dressing room questioning him.

But it isn’t hard to imagine some of them laughing behind his back. Although only 48 he is very much of the “old school” of football management.

When shouting at folk doesn’t work, then what?

Two spells as a boss have been hugely unimpressive, first at Sunderland and the second at Ipswich. If Keane is a managerial talent, it is a wonder that nobody has hired him for the top job in ten years.

He has been an assistant three times now.

The last manager he played understudy to was Paul Lambert. Enough said?

An unthinkable option for most of the fans … but a horrible suspicion remains that he is exactly the sort of appointment this board, distended from reality, might believe they can sell.

Certainly the media would lap it up, but that only serves to make the idea look worse.

We have serious business in front of us and no time to take part in the circus.

Rafa Benitez: Ticks All The Boxes

If there’s a dream candidate for most people, this is the guy.

A world class manager, with a world class pedigree, who could go anywhere and run the show and be a success.

His last job was in China, the graveyard of managerial ambition but a place where the money is so great this guy can live out his life in a gated enclave anywhere in the world, for life, and he’s going to have enough in his bank book for his kids and his grandkids and their grandkids too.

If it was all about money for Rafa Benitez then surely he has enough of it by now?

The man has made more millions, probably, than 50,000 Celtic Park season ticket holders put together could ever hope to see.

What does he want for the rest of his career?

Champions League winner and all he made be; what’s the encore going to be?

How about turning Celtic into a credible European force again?

If we’re ever going to be that we need a credible European manager.

Of all the candidates we’re talking about here, Benitez is the best of the lot of them.

It’s precisely that fact which makes him an unrealistic target for some.

This guy can just about pick his club in whatever league he chooses and name his price.

We would have to do one Hell of a sales job, but would it necessarily have to be better than the one Mike Ashley must have pitched him at Newcastle?

In a perfect world I’d love for us to find out.

Roberto Martinez: Part Of The Dream Team

I’ve already written about Roberto Martinez today, as part of my Dream Team article.

He would have been one of my choices in the year we got Rodgers; he would have been on the shortlist, and failing landing Brendan he’d have been the one I wanted. The man was an obvious pick; his football style is excellent, he is a great spotter of players and he would bring every modern innovation to the club.

He’d also bring Shaun Maloney, who knows Celtic inside out and would be a great addition to the coaching team.

Martinez and Maloney are my number one choice for this time around.

I think if we made the right pitch we’d get them … and because there are two of them, Maloney could come to Parkhead right away as the point man and he could start the job before Martinez even gets here.

That would solve our biggest problem; the problem of that ticking countdown clock.

Our club would need to be really ambitious to make this move … but are we an ambitious club or not?

Frank Lampard: “Old Firm Incorporated.”

I’ve written about this particular idea as well before; it has nothing to credit it whatsoever.

This is a punt being taken by Lampard’s agents and an over-excited media.

In football terms it should be considered an absolute non-starter.

Lampard would bring only one thing with him; the promise of a “clash of the Titans” between him and Gerrard in the dugout. That’s it’s selling point; box office, PR, media interest.

It’s just not clear what actual benefit there would be to the Celtic first team.

Lampard’s limited experience as a coach has brought no discernible success.

He is a bling choice, and for that reason alone it would be something to avoid.

But worse is the sneaking suspicion that appointing him would only serve to market us as one side of that coin of ill repute; this would largely be a promotion tool for Old Firm Incorporated, and apart from the fact Celtic fans wanted nothing to do with it when Rangers were alive it would only serve to legitimise the Survival Lie.

Woe betide our club if it adds insult to this season’s injury with something like that.

David Wagner: An Interesting Outsider

A few years ago, I think it would have been just after Rodgers left, my mate suggested David Wagner.

I had never heard of him, but I did some exploratory research and I was pretty impressed with what I found.

The German is highly thought of.

At the time he had just left Huddersfield. He had taken over there in 2015, when they were languishing in the Championship, and with a mixture of shrewd signings, smart tactics and some innovative thinking took them to the EPL.

His teams were exciting to watch and brimming full of confidence and enthusiasm.

A stickler for details and preparation, he had bonded a group of new signings and old heads on a notorious “survivalist” trip to Sweden before his first campaign there.

We took another road and so did he.

He took over German club Schalke, and there he was a disaster.

They famously went 18 games without a win before they finally terminated his contract.

That might rule him out of the running, right?

But maybe not.

He is still highly thought of in Germany, and Schalke were a nightmare choice for him, a club where everything that could go wrong did. But that’s the point; Schalke is one of those clubs where everything did go wrong, over and over again.

He arrived there when they’d had thirteen coaches in the previous ten years.

Their former chairman was a notorious racist, who was once banned by the German FA for three months for a remark he had made. During the early months of the global health crisis, their fans had lobbied the club for season ticket refunds; the club responded by telling them that if someone could prove they were destitute – including producing receipts for unpaid bills – they could have the money back.

He took over a dressing room which was already at war with itself and had already got a couple of managers the sack.

He felt out with a lot of the folk in that dressing room and they basically chucked it.

It didn’t help that their keeper wanted to leave on a free, the club gave him the armband over Wagner’s protests and then he decided to fix it by dropping the guy.

Lennon thinks he was hard-done by; these were genuinely “mitigating circumstances” of the worst sort.

It was the absolute wrong move for him.

Here’s the thing, and it might not matter to most people; his win ratio at Schalke, who are hardly one of Germany’s sexier teams, was 30%.

But bear in mind that they sacked him after an 18 game run without a win. He was there for only 40 games … which means we’ll never know whether he’d have done better at a club where everyone was on the same side. For his first 20 matches his win ratio was closer to 50% … which is a decent average in the Bundesliga.

Is he a credible candidate?

Well the reason he’s in here, other than being named in the report, is that he’s one of the two managers in it who McGowan says actually wants the job … and David Wagner is talented enough and charismatic enough that he deserves the courtesy of an interview at the very least.

Top of the list of questions will be; “What did you learn from your time at Schalke?”

If he has good answers, then he’s worth listening to.

Dan Petrescu: This Time Lucky? 

Dan Petrescu is the other manager named in the report who has apparently told Celtic that he is interested in talking to us about the job. He is a dark horse candidate for some, but this is not the first time he’s expressed an interest in us, so he’s keen anyway.

There are two problems with Petrescu; the first is that almost everything he’s achieved in the game has been achieved in Romania, although that’s split over two different clubs and he’s won titles at them both … and neither of them at the two giants of Bucharest.

Think on it this way; if the Bucharest clubs are Celtic and Sevco, he has won the league at both Aberdeen and Dundee Utd.

Which is … incredible.

We know him from tactically outclassing Lennon when Cluj came to Parkhead.

He was the man in the dugout that night, at a club where he is an icon. All of their modern success – three titles out of six they’ve ever won, were secured with him at the helm.

His other Romanian club was FC Unirea Urziceni; in the sole year in which they were title winners, he was the manager and in that same year he got Rangers in the Champions League groups.

His side were massive underdogs; they drew 1-1 at Ibrox and thrashed the enemy 4-1 at home, in one of the great shocks in Scottish football’s European football history.

He’s talented, and even brilliant.

But he’s not a settler.

This guy changes clubs every other year; look at his career history and it’s got more verses than a Leonard Cohen record.

This is not a builder, this is not a guy who will bring stability … and on top of that, he’s currently employed somewhere else so he’s not exactly showing great loyalty either.

A Nice List Of Options Amongst Many More

There’s a nice selection of candidates in there, a kind of Good, Bad and Ugly.

Are we to draw any conclusions from that list?

Is someone sending us a message?

Of the two guys who’ve applied, Petrescu has the better record, over a longer period of time, with four league titles in Romania with unfancied clubs, but Wagner is probably the better bet with the greater long term focus.

Of the rest, obviously my preference for Martinez is on the record, but of course I’d take Clarke, Howe and most definitely Benitez as well.

I’d prefer if we ignore any suggestions of either Lampard or Keane.

The one thing the article does do is remind us that the football world is a big place, full of talented individuals, many of whom have already won things at clubs great and small.

Therefore don’t let anyone tell you that we are limited in our options here.

Anyone who does is limited in their thinking … and their ambition.

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