Articles

Ange Postecoglou Is The Master Strategist Celtic Has Been Seeking For Years.

|
Image for Ange Postecoglou Is The Master Strategist Celtic Has Been Seeking For Years.

Well, so much for Celtic collapsing like a house of cards.

Whatever else might come to pass over the course of what’s left of this campaign, that “prediction” can be completely written off as a non-starter. Celtic is made of stronger stuff than that.

Our failures were strategic, not structural.

All we needed was some better leadership and a coherent plan, and all the natural advantages we had would come to the fore.

On top of that, it no longer matters whether Ange Postecoglou’s appointment was a matter of luck or design.

The fundamental fact of it is that he is the best thing to happen to this club in eons.

Not only is he an outstanding manager and a fine man, but he is the one who has brought that coherence and vision to Parkhead. So many questions were answered last night, so many things which have been coalescing are now fully formed and perfectly clear.

Let’s take the long-term debate about a director of football.

Notice that nobody ever talks about it at Celtic Park anymore.

Notice that nobody is interested in that discussion, because the critical decision on that one has already been made, and it was made on the day this guy was appointed.

The whole suggestion of it was dispatched without any formal announcement or fanfare or acknowledgement that the plan, such as it was, had radically changed, but changed it had, and whilst I think we could have been trusted with that information – and Ange would have explained the thinking behind it brilliantly – I am just glad we got it right.

That idea is as dead as Julius Caesar, put to death at the insistence of the Australian himself.

He doesn’t want an overseer and doesn’t need one.

He has no interest in somebody interfering in the day to day running of the football operation; the football operation serves the vision of Ange himself, and everything at Celtic has been bent to that goal.

The whole club deserves immense credit for being able to make that quantum leap in thinking.

The results of it are absolutely remarkable.

As daft as this will sound, some of us are in danger of underestimating just how amazing this all is.

In my view, no amount of praise properly conveys that which the manager deserves.

It’s easy to look at the results and the signings and the football we play and miss that all this is woven together; it’s not for nothing that a good team is often referred to as a “well-oiled machine” and it’s almost always one of those football clichés … but not in this case.

This is a machine, and a machine is made up of components and parts.

The thing with this Celtic side is that the vast, vast majority of those parts have been assembled by this man and he knew what every single individual one was for and what it did before any of them were put into the frame.

Not only has he built it, but he designed and engineered it.

Is it luck that Kyogo has been sensational within the system?

No, he was signed because he fitted the system perfectly.

Is it a coincidence that Hatate has played four matches and dominated three of them and scored critical goals although he’s playing in a new country, with new team-mates, having moved from the other side of the world?

No, because this manager selected him quite specifically and knew before the paperwork was signed what he would bring.

There is an oft-heard wisdom in certain industries that there are two types of company and only one of them ever really succeeds.

You can have the money men running it or you can let it be run by the engineers, the people who understand design and manufacture and who have an instinctive feel for what the consumer actually wants.

And when you think of what’s happened at Celtic, that’s kind of what this is like.

The business case in point is Apple.

About 20 years ago, I read a book by a guy called John Sculley; it’s called Odyssey.

He had been a marketing genius at Pepsi where he’d created the Pepsi Challenge amongst other great concepts.

Steve Jobs then hired him to become the CEO at Apple.

Once he was there, he changed the culture of the place.

He took the power away from the creative types and started running it based on hard numbers, in an old fashioned style which involved pushing products that were selling well and improving those products by steady increments.

For a while it looked as if he’d be successful, because they started to post profits and everyone hailed him as a genius.

His moment of maximum power came when he kicked Steve Jobs out of the company that he had founded.

The book is meant to end on a note of triumph … but we all know that it didn’t end there at all. The company floundered … Jobs initiated his own boardroom coup and suddenly the engineers were back in control again.

And they did what guys like that do.

Instead of standing still, they innovated.

They launched new products, and those are the products we’re all familiar with today.

Apple, who had cornered a section of the home computer market, colonised new fields nobody had even considered … I mean who ever thought you could charge an ordinary consumer £1000 for a phone?

Well, the design guys at Apple knew that you could, and they did that by changed what we all thought a mobile phone could do.

The same applied to the creation fo the tablet, which they called the IPad.

Such a simple idea, but beautifully realised and awesomely designed, from the sleek look of it to every single app that it ships with.

Apple is now the single biggest company on the face of the earth and the greatest corporate success story of all time, even leaving Microsoft in the shade.

All because Jobs, an engineer and creative type, put the engineers and the creative types in charge of every facet of the company. He gave them license to dream up new products and new designs and he knew that he could because he only hired the best.

The football department at Celtic has, for years, been run by the bean-counters, by the money people, and when a manager wanted a striker he went to the scouts and the scouts gave him options and he had to pick from those options.

And if it didn’t work out, well, Hell, that’s football.

So very, very often there was no logic to any of it, and you can see it everywhere over the last few years before this one; a total failure from all involved to make everything subservient to the needs of the man in the dugout.

How many signings did we make which the managers plainly didn’t want or didn’t understand?

Who was making those decisions?

For who’s benefit?

Not the club’s. So who was profiting from those deals, who was getting the best out of them, if not the manager?

We would sign players for positions we didn’t need players in. We would sign players who didn’t fit with the style of play. We would sign projects with no long term plan to get them into the team.

Even Brendan Rodgers accepted this, at least at first.

But that man was never in total control, and so the design of the team was never entirely in his gift.

The bean-counters and their placemen were the ones who presented him the lists of options … and so often they were options that actually ran directly counter to what he wanted and what we needed.

We had a plan before Ange became manager.

We always believed that it was Dominic McKay who tore that plan up, but now it’s clear that it wasn’t.

Ange himself tore it up, because he understood what Jobs and his people did when they swept back to power at Apple; if you’re going to build a machine, you don’t build it by committee or with parts handed to you by someone else, from a series of options they chose.

You start with the question; “What do I want this to do?” and from there on you only use only the parts that you need.

It cuts down on waste, for a start.

And you select each part based on the job you need that part to do … you don’t built it from a randomised set of components, as so many Celtic teams have been; you tailor it specifically to a design.

That’s how a Japanese striker who’s never kicked a ball outside of that country can come in here and bed in instantly with a team of total strangers … because he’s just a small part of a much greater concept.

That’s why almost every signing has been a success … this machine was built to start rolling the minute you push the button.

That’s why we saw the signs of all this so early, and why we kept the faith despite the early results.

That’s why some of these guys were able to make an instant impact.

Celtic has never built a football team like this before, except perhaps under Stein, who’s every move was thought out and planned and fitted into a grander scheme. Certainly, I’ve never seen it done in my lifetime.

We have a master strategist in charge here, a football engineer, a design and development guy, a builder … and that’s far better than having some tactical guru.

I keep on banging on about this, the difference between strategy and tactics.

Military people never tire of saying that “tactics win battles, but strategies win wars.”

Which isn’t to say that Ange isn’t also a masterful tactician … the combination of the two is what’s truly devastating.

Build a machine like this, and what in truth is no more than a collection of bolts and nuts and wheels and gears becomes something more, and it will run like the proverbial Swiss Watch … and it’s not a coincidence that I use that example any more than it’s luck that Reo Hatate has become a scene stealer or that Abada, a 20 year old kid, has been a sensation.

A Swiss Watch is a precision engineered marvel, with every exquisite element designed and crafted for the job that it does.

And that’s what this guy is building; a Swiss Watch of a Celtic side.

It will be a thing of beauty when it is completed … and what should scare our rivals most is that as smoothly as it runs right now, it isn’t finished yet. This is still being tweaked and tinkered with and made even better.

This is a great thing we’re looking at here folks, and I am going to savour every second of it.

This is a team our grandkids will be talking about, and will wish they’d seen for themselves.

Share this article

0 comments

  • Mark B says:

    Great night for Celtic and especially vindication for Ange. First half was scintillating , best in a long time and importantly we figured out how to beat them. Hard to pick individuals but Hatate, Juranovic O’Riley Abada had their best ever Celtic games. We even managed to look comfortable at set pieces for once. We are all happy today…..we now need to turn the srew and keep winning. Well done to the whole team at Celtic for giving us a terrific night. Lets go win the League, then we can really celebrate.

  • Mark B says:

    Taylor also had his best ever Celtic game.

  • Frankie pearson says:

    Great article James hopefully wee can go on and won the league,collect the champions league money this will cover players bought and more.Wee question for you James have you heard from shug the mug (keevins) sevco will go unbeaten.shug go and chase butterflies in a very large field.

  • Bob (original) says:

    If Ange does deliver the League title as well, then the Board better not delay in offering him a significantly improved, longer contract.

    In fact, considering the desperate position the club was in when Howe walked off:
    whatever happens this season, Ange has already earned that recognition and reward.

  • Roonsa says:

    [JOKE] but we didn’t turn up second half!!!!! [/JOKE]

  • Roonsa says:

    Last night was obviously magic. For some, putting that lot in their place is the be all and end all in terms of what they want and where they want Celtic to be. And that’s OK – but for too long we’ve set our sights too low.

    I want to see progress against teams in Europe, proper football teams. I was disappointed not qualifying for the CL or getting to the knockouts in the Europa – but you have to remember the shambles Ange inherited.

    Celtic have to use this springboard to not only go on to win the League as we all should demand never mind expect but to go into Europe next season and make a splash. As for this season’s Europa Conference or whatever they call it – let’s see what we can do but the League must remain the priority.

    Nice article. Good read. Thank you.

  • Damian says:

    Beautiful performance last night. We have a wonderful manager who has overseen incredible progress so far and is in the process of assembling an excellent team.

    We absolutely must appoint a Director of Football – one who can build on Ange Postecoglou’s work whenever he departs; one who knows how to replace him and who with. This is vital. Absolutely vital.

  • SSMPM says:

    Top top performance that, every one of our players stood up on a most smashtastic night, apart from Joe Hart who didn’t do much ha ha. Ange’s has smashed the wheel of negative influence of the board and even they are now acting under his instruction. Should we now keep Kennedy and Strachan in place. They too appear to be coaching soundly and proficiently under Ange’s instruction, if outcomes are the standard by which we judge then Ange has had the most positive influence on their careers too. Don’t really want to heap praise on particular individuals from the night when it was the whole that produced a top top performance. HH

    • Damian says:

      We should keep them if the manager wants them to stay. There was an Australian Celtic fan on one of the podcasts earlier in the season who said that Ange tends to work with what’s there in his first season anywhere he’s been, then sack people and make changes the following season. His call, entirely.

  • Martin H. says:

    Great article James, everything you say is true, plus he’s got the media in his pocket.

  • Malc says:

    I really think Big Ange is going to retire that clown Keevins by the end of the season.

    • Roonsa says:

      We really need to rise above the stupidity of paying attention to what tittle-tatlers like Keevins and the gossip column media have to say about our team. It really doesn’t matter.

      Keevins didn’t genuinely think that the huns would go the rest of the season undefeated. It was an attention grabbing piece of sensationalism to garner a reaction. And it worked.

      You think he cares Celtic slaughtered the huns last night? He’ll simply say (in his usual pompous fashion) something like: “I was wrong, I am only human. It’s my job to give opinions and this time my opinion was wrong”.

      That’ll be the last you hear of that prediction and he’ll move on to the next piece of garbage to get people riled.

      Being a Celtic fan should be so much more than wasting your time giving that guy any time whatsoever.

      • Damian says:

        Exactly. He’s paid to say things that make people phone in and get talking. He’s quite good at it (if you accept that as his purpose). Celtic fans fall for it like a ritual. Hugh Keevins making a long-shot Scottish football prediction (any team, no matter how good going 16 games or whatever without losing one is not a likely bet) is no more likely to come to pass than if he were to predict a comeback for Pat on Eastenders. If you don’t like him, don’t listen. But, the ratings go up when he’s on. It’s why he’s on twice a week.

        • Roonsa says:

          Is Pat coming back to Eastenders? When? Where did you hear this? I can’t wait to see how she makes a return from the grave. Maybe she’ll come back as a zombie – which would be quite apt when you think about it.

  • jrm63 says:

    The question remains though. Can the apostles keep up with the physical demands placed on them by the Messiah’s system of football? Or will we be hamstrung? Especially with 2 games a week for the foreseeable. Abada and Jota were dead on their feet, O’Riley and Hatate as well. Turnbull and Kyogo already out. It is an issue. The first 45 was the best performance in a long time but the physical demands of this system are severe.

    • Roonsa says:

      Being able to maintain that level of intensity for the full match is obviously something Celtic can’t get to as yet. There is, however, no reason why they can’t get there.

      The way Liverpool FC play football is what Celtic should aspire to. I am not saying we have players as good as Mo Salah or Sadio Mane (in fact- their whole first team which is immense) – however, we are playing at a lower level than the EPL so Celtic should surely be aiming to play that sort of football for 90 minutes against the bigger teams home and away.

      The Hearts match was a worry for me. So the intensity thing does not addressing. If winning the League this season wasn’t so vital then I’d say Ange has time to develop it. But we really don’t. We have to keep winning and just hope we don’t suffer any more major injuries.

  • John S says:

    If I had one on-field doubt about the manager it was the unwillingness to hold on to a winning lead in Europe and continue to go ‘gung-ho’. Last night’s game resolved that concern. Yes, it could’ve been 7-0 but the points were the target and they were in the bag by half-time.

  • Iljas Baker says:

    Glad you gave plaudits to Giorgos Giakoumakis as I thought he had an excellent game. I so want that guy to score and keep scoring.

    The jury I believe is still out on a Director of Football sort of appointment and his role in relation to the manager. But who will find someone like Ange when he eventually goes on to higher ground? Or do we just leave it to the board and get someone in and go back to square one? How we are playing now is how we want Celtic to play always and we want the academy and everything else aligned with it.

    Ange’s way of dealing with the demands of the system is to improve fitness and have a big enough squad. He’s showing that it really works.

    We have so many great players at the moment it is hard to believe.

  • SSMPM says:

    Playing at that intensity for 11 players is well nigh impossible, without the stresses and strains having an impact on them as we seem to see almost weekly. Just watched the game back on Ctv and still proud as punch at that performance. Everyone gave us everything until they were ready to collapse.
    Hearing a lot today about injured players and how their return will strengthen the 1st team, but to be honest I think few can think about walking back into that team or expect to. I think Ange has moved us beyond that mindset of 1st team and thinks more in terms of a Celtic squad. No matter who he calls on, they train in a manner that means they can do a turn in the system when called upon. We will have a hand-full of regular starters no doubt but if we are to play in the same high intensive manner we need the squad and Ange has provided it. As for Europe…I don’t think Ange sees us a Europa (or Conf) League team no more and that’s a vision I’m right behind. HH

Comments are closed.