Nancy continues to sound like a manager who did not know what Celtic is.

I do not dislike Wilfried Nancy. He came to Celtic and tried something different. He did not hire himself. The Celtic board hired him, so I don’t feel any real ill will towards the man for what went wrong while he was here.

But the more he talks, the clearer it becomes that he should never have been hired in the first place.

Paul Tisdale gets the blame for Nancy, and I understand why. To understand how we ever came to have him as manager, you have to look at Tisdale, because it was apparently his bright idea to bring him in.

That decision is rooted, I think, in an offhand comment Tisdale allegedly made to a meeting of Celtic box holders and commercial partners. He is said to have told them he did not consider Celtic a top-30 European club, almost as if the very idea was absurd.

It is difficult to know what to say to that. There was a fundamental miscalculation on Tisdale’s part about who he was actually working for.

He may have been speaking the literal truth in terms of a board of directors that does not act as if we are a top European club. But to tell executive box holders and commercial partners that he personally did not consider us one is pretty disgusting.

That, I think, helps explain the Nancy hiring. It also helps explain Nancy’s recent comments, which I know have annoyed a lot of Celtic fans.

Personally, I can’t get too upset about them. The guy was brought in, proved incapable, and the experiment was brought to an abrupt halt. In spite of the time and money wasted on him, it did not have a debilitating effect in the end.

We won the title. We won the double.

But I do feel a little sympathy for Nancy, because it is abundantly clear that he was in a job far too big for him. A job he only half understood.

That was one of the things that concerned me at the time.

When you listened to him talk, he seemed to understand the requirements of the job only on a surface level. The reality of it hit him like a sledgehammer, and I don’t think he has fully recognised where he went wrong even now.

It is all well and good saying managers are judged on results. On that basis alone, he certainly deserved to be in big trouble, if not fired.

But the reason Nancy did not get more time is simple.

Time would not have helped him.

I was willing to give him the Hearts game. It was his first match. I was willing to give him the Europa League game against Roma because I did not think anyone could have won that game with our squad.

But his comments before and after the cup final were deeply disturbing.

No Celtic manager who has just lost at Hampden to St Mirren, and watched silverware go by the boards, should be quite so nonchalant about it. No Celtic manager who loses his first three games in a row should appear so casual about the scale of what is happening.

In the aftermath of that final, the very least I expected from him was an acknowledgement to the fans that he understood the gravity of the situation.

Losing a cup final against a team most people assumed we should beat, and probably beat comfortably, was the moment doubts became serious concerns. The fact he did not seem to grasp that made the problem obvious.

A Celtic manager should not need someone to spell out that losing games like that is unacceptable. It should not take protests or rising anger from the support before you understand what the job demands.

Giving him more time would not have changed that. In fact, it might only have reinforced his own view that he was at a club where he could meander through, take his time and not worry too much about results.

I understand building something. I understand that pieces have to be put in place. If Celtic fans understand what you are trying to do, and if the team buys into it, then you will get patience.

Ange Postecoglou proved that.

His early away record was dreadful, but in the home games, when we were blitzing teams by six, you could see the outline of what he was trying to build. You could see the direction of travel. You knew that once the away form caught up with the home form, we would take some stopping.

There was trust because there was evidence.

With Nancy, there were flashes of good attacking football, but you never genuinely believed we carried the same threat. You never believed we could shore up the back.

I don’t know if it was arrogance. I don’t know if it was underestimation. I don’t know if he was sold a bill of goods by the people who hired him.

But Paul Tisdale’s view of Celtic surely played a part in how Nancy saw the job. If Tisdale took that same attitude into negotiations, if he gave Nancy any reason to believe we were the provincial club he had suggested to corporate bigwigs, then I can understand why Nancy thought he had all the time in the world to get his ideas across.

But he didn’t. He said he came into a culture that did not want to change. I find that easier to believe of the boardroom than the playing squad.

There are players in that dressing room who would have got behind what Nancy wanted to do if he had convinced them. I have no doubt about that. Even Callum McGregor wanted to learn. He wanted to be part of it.

Had the players been convinced, I think they would eventually have bought in. But Nancy was never going to convince them.

No Celtic manager who emerges from a cup final defeat without properly apologising to supporters, without accepting that the result is unacceptable, and without acknowledging the hurt and anger as legitimate, stands much chance.

He just didn’t get it.

The gap between where he thought he was and the club we still are, for all our faults, was too great to bridge. His mentality was wrong. His mindset was wrong.

This club needs someone who understands the first requirement of the job. The big one. The only one that really matters. Win.

For all the faults with the idea of appointing Martin O’Neill, he gets that. He never had to have it explained to him. Had he been manager that day at Hampden, and lost, the first thing he would have done after the game was apologise to the fans for the result and the performance.

He would have accepted it as a concerning moment. He would have understood that it demanded self-reflection inside the club and changes in the dressing room.

Brendan Rodgers would never have accepted a cup final defeat at that stage of the season and done nothing to alter the mentality in the room.

It is not that Nancy did not care. Of course he cared.

Everyone who loses a cup final cares.

He just did not understand the size of it.

He could not fully grasp why it was such a big deal. At a club with Celtic’s history, our trophy record, our expectations and our winning culture, that sort of blindness should have been impossible. Unthinkable.

Yet that was the mindset Tisdale brought with him, and it was the mindset Nancy seems to have absorbed.

So when we are looking for candidates for the two biggest jobs in the football department, they have to know what is expected of them. Not just intellectually. They have to feel it in their bones.

They have to understand that they are coming into a massive club trying to rebuild its reputation in Europe while continuing to dominate domestically.

Those things have to go hand in hand.

Winning is not the most important thing at Celtic. It is the only thing.

Anyone who does not understand that does not belong anywhere near Celtic Park.

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