Another Celtic managerial possibility has closed the door. Thank God.

Last night, another managerial possibility for Celtic was closed off, probably for good. I, for one, was delighted that it was. Steve Clarke signed a new deal with Scotland.

At the same time, I wasn’t happy, because as a follower of the Scottish national team, I am pretty appalled that someone thinks Steve Clarke has done enough to warrant a new deal. In typical SFA fashion, he gets it before the major competition instead of after it.

Clarke deserves praise for getting Scotland to the World Cup. I hear that all the time, and it is true. He has done a reasonably good job in qualifying campaigns. But the football has been brutal. The football has been ugly. Nobody has enjoyed watching it.

The problem with Clarke is that he is too cautious as a manager. He is too stubborn, too wedded to his favourite system, and I still could not tell you exactly what that system is supposed to achieve beyond survival.

Clarke is a strange manager, and his handling of Scotland has always reflected that. The real indictment remains the Euros. In the final group game, when Scotland needed a win to stay in the tournament, we played a defensive system and failed even to register a shot on goal.

That should hang around his shoulders forever. He deserves that. Clarke should not have survived that tournament. The SFA should have asked to see him as soon as it was over, thanked him for his service and allowed him to go.

So no, I do not want Steve Clarke leading Scotland into this World Cup. I have said that on many occasions. Now he is not only definitively leading us into the World Cup, which was never really in much doubt, but he has a deal that runs through to the 2030 campaign. The SFA has given up hope of doing better.

I’m aghast at that. But every cloud has a silver lining.

The silver lining here is that Steve Clarke is no longer going to be considered a serious candidate for the Celtic job.

I know there were people promoting this mad idea. Chief among them was Michael Gannon from The Daily Record, whose article on Clarke and his supposed suitability for Celtic was one of the most astonishing things I’ve read in a while.

His contention appeared to be that Clarke is some adventurous manager trapped inside the limitations of the national team. According to this lunatic piece, Clarke dreams of being Ange Postecoglou, and had Celtic hired him, the real manager would suddenly have emerged.

I do not know what is more unbelievable: that Gannon could believe that, or that he expected any of us to believe it.

Because let’s not beat around the bush. That is pretty nuts.

Clarke did not play that way at Kilmarnock. He has not played that way with Scotland. International football actually affords managers a degree of flexibility and experimentation that club managers do not always get.

Some of the teams you face, especially in friendlies, are so mismatched that if Clarke wanted to experiment with being Ange Postecoglou, he has had plenty of opportunities.

I have never seen him try.

Martin O’Neill has brought Celtic success, but I don’t know that I want to watch another year of that football. Brendan Rodgers was widely criticised, despite his success, for the “horseshoe of death,” which I always thought was exaggerated, although I understood the general point.

People who did not enjoy watching those two would not have enjoyed Steve Clarke.

The rest would not have enjoyed Steve Clarke either.

As Paulina has pointed out many times in her excellent articles on the ethos of Celtic, we need a manager who is aggressive. We need a lion in the dugout. We need someone who understands the philosophy of Celtic and how it is built on attacking football.

That is not Steve Clarke.

No Michael Gannon article, or article by anyone else, will convince me that buried beneath that bald pate and those glasses is some wannabe risk-taker extraordinaire.

I do not believe it.

But I do understand that there are people at Celtic, perhaps on the board, who might have thought Clarke was an option. Gannon has contacts at Celtic. If he didn’t, he would be banned along with everyone else at that paper.

I always wonder, when I read a Gannon piece, whether someone is taking a flyer on behalf of someone else. Whether he is putting up a flag to see who salutes it.

Perhaps the Clarke piece was something like that. Perhaps someone inside Celtic was testing the water. If so, I can tell them how it went down. Like a lead weight.

I did not meet or speak to a single Celtic supporter who read that article and was on board with the idea. Not one. It would have been astonishing to meet anyone of that way of thinking. It would have been incredible had there been a serious and dedicated constituency among Celtic fans in favour of that folly.

Someone asked me if I thought Clarke would take the job.

Talk about a silly question.

Had Steve Clarke been offered the Celtic job, he would have cleared his desk at Hampden the same day.

Of course, the media would have crucified him for that and called him a traitor, using all the words they did not use about Walter Smith when he returned to Ibrox, and all the words they did not use about Alex McLeish when he went to Birmingham.

Clarke has said he does not like the goldfish-bowl element of being a manager in Glasgow. That does not mean he would have said no to Celtic. I have never believed for a second that Clarke would have turned us down had the offer been on the table.

That is why I have always been grateful that the offer never was.

Look, I wish the guy well. I hope he proves me wrong. In a sense, he already has. I thought he should have been sacked after the Euros. I said he should not get a World Cup qualification campaign to mess up, and he did not mess it up.

We are there. We made it.

But I do not expect the tournament to be brilliant to watch. I do not expect it to be a thrill a minute. I do not expect us to qualify for the knockout stages for the first time ever.

If Scotland come back in disgrace and disarray, questions will need to be asked about the people at Hampden who thought it was a good idea to hand him a deal before the tournament that could make or break him.

Listening to Ian Maxwell tonight saying they never take a short-term view with a manager made my heart sink. First, it is rubbish. Every single board in football takes a short-term view of a manager who is not getting it done.

Secondly, Clarke’s critics are not basing their opposition to this deal only on what might happen at the World Cup. There is already ample evidence for the prosecution.

You cannot have watched our long run of games without a win, and our run of matches where it looked like that slide might never end, and thought: yes, this is the guy who should be our manager far into the future.

The one thing Celtic have done right in the last calendar year, the one thing, the only thing, was to realise quickly enough that Wilfried Nancy was going to doom our season and terminate his contract.

I wrote about Nancy yesterday. I do not wish him any ill will, just as I do not wish Clarke any ill will. But Nancy should never have been appointed in the first place because he did not understand the requirements of the club.

Our board could have taken the Ian Maxwell route. They could have said they had committed to this guy, believed in his long-term vision and were going to support him. Celtic would look very different right now had that decision been taken.

Not in a good way.

Quite what our national team is going to look like when it returns from America, I could not tell you. But their loss is very much Celtic’s gain in this regard.

I did not want Steve Clarke at Scotland. I wanted him at Celtic a whole lot less.

That is one door I am happy to see closed.

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