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Ex-Celtic Players Name The Good, Bad And Ugly Of Our Management Options.

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I don’t like to knock our ex-players but so many of them at the moment seem to be crawling out of the woodwork to give us their views on what the club should do next.

Few have offered anything by way of a suggestion that the fans would get behind.

In this article I want to take a look at the runners and riders as it were, the names which ex-Celts have already thrown into the hat.

There will be many more, but what we have already is a collection of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Although some have made decent suggestions, for the most part this is pretty dreadful.

You would be hard pressed to find much support for the majority of them amongst the fans.

It makes you wonder what planet these people are on.

SIMON DONNELLY

Simon Donnelly is promoting Henrik Larsson, which of all the ideas out there is certainly close to being the worst.

He thinks the King would earn a statue outside the ground if he came back and succeeded.

It appears not to bother him that Larsson’s managerial experience thus far has been a bust and that he would be a momentous gamble most would prefer the club didn’t even consider.

Larsson himself is savvy enough to know he’s not near the required standard.

Donnelly actually thinks the marriage of Larsson and Celtic would “sell out the season tickets twice over.”

I don’t know who he’s been listening to if he believes that; it would be an horrific decision which would only confirm that our board doesn’t have a clue.

PAUL HARTLEY

Paul Hartley too believes we need a “box office” candidate, and he has gone for Roy Keane.

Jesus wept.

Another suggestion which makes the average fans toes curl.

Celtic fans don’t want “box office” for the sake of it; the guy has to be able to, you know, run the football team.

A famous name in the dugout means nothing without that basic level of skill.

Keane’s managerial career has been chequered, and that’s the generous way to put it.

Both he and Larsson have dabbled with the front line postings and have settled into nice respectable reputations as good assistants.

They have two different philosophies, but neither is manager material.

Keane is so old school that it makes you wince to think of him in the dressing room, bawling people out and generally trying to rule by fear. We don’t need any more of that, thanks.

CHARLIE NICHOLAS

Charlie Nicholas (God, I know) has suggested five names, and each is more ridiculous than the last.

He thinks Lawwell should be talking to the agents of Xavi (he’s in his first manager’s job, in the powerhouse league of Qatar), Vincent Kompany (Anderlecht, where he’s 5th) and Xabi Alonso (who’s managing the Real Sociedad B team.)

He threw in Thierry Henry and Frank Lampard for good measure.

Like those others, he has a ridiculous obsession with bling names and it doesn’t seem to bother him that none of these guys is remotely ready to take on a job of this magnitude.

You really have to give Nicholas some kind of back-handed credit though.

Donnelly and Hartley threw one bad name each at us.

Which is fine, and you can disagree with that.

But Nicholas took a broader view; some would call it scattershot.

It takes real talent (of a sort) to suggest five names and have every single one of them being an absolute stinker.

Amazing really.

JOHN COLLINS

He, like Nicholas, has gone for broke and rattled off suggestions like a guy using a Thompson machine gun.

But three of his four suggestions aren’t actually all that bad.

He has Howe and Martinez on his list, along with the Salzburg coach Jessie Marsch; it’s an interesting pick because he’s a manager with much to admire about him, and would be a damned fine shout.

Collins actually only lets himself down when he throws Frank Lampard’s name into the mix because I cannot see a single thing to credit that suggestion except for the bling aspect and the way the media would sell it as part of Old Firm Inc. and a battle between two former EPL midfield legends.

But as a coach, Lampard hasn’t got anything credible to suggest that he’s nearly good enough to be a candidate, far less actually get the gig and I really do wish people would stop throwing his name into the hat.

Celtic’s board might actually start thinking it’s a goer.

JONATHON GOULD

Our former big keeper dropped a name into the suggestion box recently, and it was one of his former bosses, Alex Neil, currently at Preston.

It’s an interesting name, because there are hints that he was in the frame before the shower scene at Hampden when the board chose Lennon. This makes it a more than credible that our board might pursue him.

Neil isn’t exactly a sexy name.

He has a reasonable record, but it’s nothing to get excited over.

But Gould describes him in a way that’s very flattering, as a stickler for details, as the kind of guy who gets really involved on the training pitch and prepares meticulously for games by studying the opposition and devising plans for various scenarios.

I was actually pretty impressed reading it.

We should give Alex Neil a proper look on this blog at some point, and especially as there might be something here beyond just talk and a former player giving us his opinion on the guy.

PAT BONNER

Another goalkeeping legend from Parkhead, and a BBC Radio Scotland pundit; he has taken an interesting option and, like Collins, but not quite as scattershot, he is promoting the Salzburg coach Jesse Marsch.

And he has given good reasons why.

For one thing, there’s the attacking football that they play, which was exemplified in them going to Anfield and scoring three teams, in what might have been one of the great shock results of recent years.

Indeed, it is hard to think of a team who attacks with the kind of style which they do and which scores as many goals.

Bonner described him as a tactician and a creative “out of the box” thinker, and put him firmly in “the Brendan Rodgers mould” which let’s face it is pretty high praise.

The Red Bull family – where he worked too at Leipzig – have been good to Marsch and have clearly shown enormous faith in him.

Prising him out of their hands would not be remotely easy, or cheap, but this is a guy who could definitely bring back the thunder and the kind of football we would all want to pay to go and watch.

It’s a very credible suggestion, so big Bonner gets high marks for it.

DAMIEN DUFF

This is a little disingenuous of me, because Damien Duff has not actually expressed a preference, but he spoke in such reverential terms about one specific individual that there’s little doubt that he would give him the job in two seconds flat.

The individual in question? None other than John Kennedy himself.

Duff has the odd, and almost unique, experience of being able to talk about this stuff from the perspective of someone who knows this stuff.

Describing Kennedy to a podcast recently he poured such praise on him that if you didn’t know who he was talking about you’d have wanted the guy appointed the same day.

“John Kennedy is without doubt one of the best coaches in the world,” he said. “It comes down to detail, his detail is second to none, I’ve never seen detail like it. Some coaches can be like Ray Charles and not see things that are going on in the game whereas John doesn’t miss a trick. He sees the problem, “how are we going to fix it?”. Absolutely frightening.”

Those last two words are how most Celtic fans view the prospect … but as I said at the weekend before the Aberdeen game, we have no way of knowing that because Kennedy hasn’t had a chance to prove himself yet.

These games are his big audition … and we should all be very interested in what we find out in the course of them.

CHRIS SUTTON

Our former striker has come up with two candidates, one of whom has scarily been mentioned elsewhere and the other who I hope is never mentioned again; they are Michael O’Neill an Mick McCarthy. Both Irishmen.

Which right away rings alarm bells as it shows a fundamental lack of any sort of imagination whatsoever.

The scary thing is that this isn’t the first time McCarthy has been mentioned; Celtic apparently likes the idea of appointing him as his current contract runs out at the end of the season and thus he’d be available on a free.

He’s 62.

He has been a manager at six clubs and the Republic of Ireland twice; he has two Championships in his time, at Sunderland and Wolves.

He’s allegedly worked something of a miracle at Cardiff, but then he’s only been there for 10 games and has drawn three of them, so people should be too excited.

I cannot think of a candidate who would be less inspiring.

Honestly, the idea is ridiculous.

Michael O’Neill isn’t much better, and his coming up on the radar had a grim sort of inevitability about it after his time with the Northern Irish national team.

He has been at Stoke for over a year; his win record is under 40%.

His previous club management experience was at Shamrock Rovers and Brechin.

He’s been mentioned. I am glad he has.

Because we can dismiss this as ludicrous now and hope that’s enough for it never to be brought up again.

JEREMIE FRIMPONG

I am putting this one second last just for the LOL’s because it is absolutely barking.

Our former full-back, who wasn’t at the club long enough to have his nappy changed and who seen very little of life in the big bad world of the global game has his own first pick for the gig.

It’s Scott Brown, who is still, of course, our captain and has never taken as much as a coaching session in his life.

Which tells you what you need to know about Frimpong’s judgement at the moment.

But hey, he’s a kid and that will hopefully come with time.

Frimpong can be forgiven for this naivety; not everyone on this list can say the same.

Some of them have come up with ideas so ridiculous you’d think this was a parody.

PAUL LAMBERT

I saved the best for last; Lambert hasn’t expressed a preference for the job, unless we’re giving it back to Neil Lennon who he seems to think was the most hard-done-by guy on the planet, but he has been pretty clear, at least, about who shouldn’t get it.

Himself. Which is honest of him and decent, I thought.

Because although the press were desperate to spin the headline that he’d ruled himself out as some kind of snub, read what Lambert is actually saying and you get a guy who is not confident that he do the job and wouldn’t risk taking it on.

You all know I’ve had my issues with Lambert, but I can respect him for realising his own limitations and wanting to guard his reputation as a fine servant to Celtic.

I suspect, based on prior statements, that Larsson would say exactly the same thing.

Lambert is a smart guy, and there’s never been any doubt about that.

Ruling himself out – he said that he wouldn’t take it under any circumstances – was definitely the clever move. He has ended all the speculation about him at a stroke, and that’s all to the good.

I wonder if we can get some others to do the same; we’d all sleep better knowing that McCarthy, Mackay and a handful of others had as well.

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