Earlier today, the Aberdeen chairman announced that they hope to have completed the management interview process, and named their next boss, within a couple of weeks. This is impressive considering they fired McInnes after we fired Lennon, and they still look as if they could beat us to the unveiling of their next boss.
It makes you wonder if the Celtic board even cares that we’re on a clock.
We all know that this job is too big to do a rush appointment on.
If we were going to do that we could have put someone like Keane in there already … almost all of the candidates we have been linked to are currently out of work.
But at the same time, the job is clearly too important for people to be dragging their feet on as well.
Because that clock is real and it is ticking in the background.
The press is speculating that we want a Director of Football in before the manager.
The truth is, a manager should know he can work with a director of football and know that they are not going to be at cross purposes. Whatever one is hired first is largely unimportant; these two men are a partnership and have to get along.
I would prefer that the manager was in already.
I would prefer that we weren’t gambling the Scottish Cup on John Kennedy.
It might well be that our top managerial candidate is actually in a job right now, but how long are we supposed to wait?
Aberdeen are hardly rushing. Their chairman claims that they will take the necessary time and vet the interested candidates and those they’ve interviewed and make their decision in due course; there’s every chance that we’ll still be waiting to learn who ours is going to be when they complete their own internal process.
Why does everything at Celtic Park take seem to take so long?
We must have known that Lennon was unlikely still to be manager next season as far back as November; that’s five months ago. Were we really caught totally unprepared for this eventuality?
Today marks the three-week point since Lennon left; I bet you, like me, feels like it’s been longer than that. But he departed the club on 23 February, although the writing was on the wall well before that.
Is three weeks too soon for a major club like Celtic to do its business?
Other clubs have sacked their managers and had the new guy in on the same day.
I get that we need to make the right call here.
Part of the problem with appointing Lennon in the first place is that we went for a stop gap option on the spur of the moment and then stuck with him; that was a tremendous mistake.
The board is fully aware that it has to be seen to doing a proper search; but then, most of us assumed there was a search going on all the way through Lennon’s “temporary” stop-over. And Lawwell told us there wasn’t.
The importance of getting it right means that fans will be forgiving if this goes on a little longer, but only as long as we bring in someone half decent at the end of it.
What we cannot have is a month or more of this just to unveil Roy Keane or someone of that ilk.
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