Ange Accepted Responsibility Last Night, But Assured Us Celtic Will Be Better For It.

There are a lot of managers in the business who think they are the dogs nuts.

One of them sits in the dugout across the city, and he really is only kidding himself on with some of what comes out of his mouth.

One of the great pleasures of next season will be watching him come apart because he shows signs of it every week now and he’s not really under pressure yet.

But Ange keeps on getting the communication part of it dead on right, and he does this by not thinking he’s the lord of all creation. I grow more impressed with him as time goes by.

By now we think we’ve seen it all, but still this man surprises us.

Last night, in the aftermath of what was easily the team’s worst performance in domestic football since he took over, he was cool and calm except when he was asked a typically ridiculous question by a BBC hack determined to turn a modest drama into a crisis.

I’ll cover that later, because it’s an important story in and of itself … but let’s take his less controversial comments first, because they were actually far more interesting and instructive.

Ange did that rarest thing last night; he not only copped the flak for what had gone wrong, but he did something I’ve rarely seen.

He explained why the decisions he makes in the here and now, and which he said caused that defeat, will pay off for us in the future. And you know what? I actually do believe him on that front.

“I am the one making five or six line-up changes every week. That’s hurting the side and there’s no doubt about that, but I’m doing it for a reason and that has affected our level of performance,” he said.

And he then went on to explain his thinking.

“In the last three weeks, they haven’t been to be benefit of the team. These guys are out there and in many respects it is not fair on them as I am putting these guys in and that would be okay if there were one or two changes but I’m making five or six changes a game and that is hard on the guys coming in, I totally get that … That’s just the way I do things as I like to throw guys out there and it is a sink or swim mentality, but we provide the support and give them the feedback to be better.”

So this really is about toughening people up. It’s about trial by fire.

These guys are being tested, and they are being tested under a harsh and unforgiving spotlight.

Except that none of us matter.

The people who do matter are those inside the club, those whose job it is to show these guys the clips and the stats and talk to them on the training pitch and tell them “You need to be doing this a lot better, you need to be doing that a little differently.”

So Ange knows these guys are going to make mistakes.

He’s picked this point in the season to throw them in there because right now these mistakes don’t matter a damn. So the lessons that everyone involved learns can be had without great cost.

This isn’t particularly radical stuff, but it’s another example of what a great communicator he is that he’s able to impart this information in such a way.

This is a manager essentially telling us that he’s blooding these guys and knows it’s going to be gruesome.

But he won’t judge them on what they do in the here and now because this is part of their development cycle. “It’s a sink or swim mentality,” he says, and that’s critical to understanding why we’re going to be better off for this.

This guy may be admitting that this stuff is down to him, but that’s not the same as saying he’s got it wrong. He knows exactly what he’s doing … and that’s comforting even on a day when we’re all still trying to make sense of what we saw.

It makes perfect sense to the manager, and in a weird way this is how he wants it because he knows what emerges from the other side of it will be stronger for the experience.

We are, and have been from the start, in the hands of a man who knows exactly where all the pieces fit.