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.