Celtic are officially the Nancy Bhoys.
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The place will be rocking for Martin’s last game now.
Welcome to Wilfried.
In order to finish Martin O’Neill’s Roll With It period on top of the table Celtic require:
A victory and a Heart Of Midlothian defeat
or
A five goal victory and a Heart Of Midlothian draw.
Maeda scores to make it 1-0 to Celtic but gets a right clatter in the head in the process.
We go again.
OGS is the man.
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Is he not gone? Seriously? This will death by a thousand cuts if not
Malcolm Tucker in the thick of it summed it up best in relation to the boards next step:The PM is not going to sack you after a week. Sacked after 12 months - looks live you’ve fucked up. Sacked after a week - looks like he’s fucked up.
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I spent 20/30 minutes checking Celtic cyberspace last night & I literally didn’t find one post/comment/tweet advocating he be given time. Not even from the usually reserved & considered & less reactionary types. It’s looking like yourself & @Cheasty & others will very much be right here. I don’t necessarily like comparing anything that happens at Celtic to events at the huns, but it’s looking a bit like Russell Martin tbh. If you lose the fans to this extent so early then it’s nigh on impossible to turn things around. The body language of the players in some of the clips I saw screamed that they think he’s a bluffer, albeit they’ve been abysmal for most of the calendar year post Munich.
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Ange is available too.
@Rocko
Would you get rid?
I don’t think they can give him a year. It’s getting too toxic. Not his fault, but he’s the stalking horse for the board now.
I heard a nine second audio of Liam Scales being asked why he thought the players looked lost.
“D’nno”, he muttered barely audibly under his breath.
Liam Scales is an indefatigable Irish Wolfhound. You can question his football ability, but the one thing you can never question is his ATTITUDE.
But even Liam Scales sounded like Father Stone had knocked on his door uninvited and decided to stay for the next year.
This is Liz Truss territory. Or maybe Kwasi Kwarteng.
I had a look at a thread on a Columbus Crew forum which gained some traction among Celtic supporters and is about half comments from Columbus Crew supporters and half by Celtic supporters.
On this thread the Columbus Crew supporters are ridiculing Celtic supporters for being unhappy with Nancy. They say the Celtic supporters are clueless and deluded and impatient. OK maybe there’s an element of truth to that - but in a completely different way to what the Columbus Crew supporters think.
These Columbus Crew fanbois sounded like crazy Truss supporters eulogising the genius of Kwasi’s budget which then had to be quickly abolished.
Now I’m all for patience when patience is warranted. But I’m not for patience with a godhelpus.
Up to now I’d have been a sort of general well wisher towards American SAWKER.
But jaysus the mindset and seemingly the football over there too is pure Disneyland stuff. The rot runs deeper in the American mind than even I imagined.
Jim White asked Martin O’Neill on TalkSport this morning he was in the studio whether it had whetted his appetite if another job offer came along.
O’Neill said absolutely. He said he has energy to burn and has never lost his appetite for the game.
What in the fuck were the Celtic board doing? Did anyone even ask him if he wanted to stay on?
O’Neill would have lifted the place. He was already doing it.
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Nancy didn’t even chat with MON for 20 minutes
None of what you’re saying is wrong but anybody is going to struggle with that team. They are fucking terrible. The worst collection of players playing for a big club anywhere in the world.
Martin O’Neill was at one point on the way to becoming one of the greatest football managers of all time. There is a cult of personality with him that this group would never have seen before and it worked. As stated by @Cheasty he should’ve been left there as no one else is going to wring the same amount out of them. He also played very simple football which is a plus with marginal talent like this.
Any progressive young coach will struggle here and you’d need a Heimir or a Robbie Keane that plays very pragmatic football. Nygren is one of the worst, maybe the worst player I’ve ever seen at a big club.
He doesn’t train the team, he just picked it. He and Maloney had a good thing going there. Desmond and Lawel seem to get it all wrong these days.
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Yeah it’s a litany of incoherent actions/decisions by the board & then Nancy himself too.
Like the Celtic board is usually ultra cautious yet they decided to hand the keys over mid-season to Nancy who’s only been a frontline manager for 4/5 years & all of that in MLS & not in Europe. My initial take was he’s more Deila than Ange but I was perhaps influenced by @Rocko (cc @Jake_Stevens) & a couple of my favourite Celtic podder personalities to row in fully behind him. Even at that, no Celtic fan wants a Celtic manager to fail whatever reservations you may have.
You also then take into account he’s absolutely wedded to 3-4-2-1 & the personnel available is completely ill-suited to it - lack of ball playing centre backs, a few diddy ineffective wingers but no hard running, ball carrying wing backs, absence of midfield technicians/attacking mids to play as the pair of 10s & to play all these triangles between the lines etc etc. It’s echoes of Amorim taking over in November last year & all the growing pains there.
O’Neill, as you say, simplified things & had them playing a basic 4-4-1-1 or 4-2-3-1. It wasn’t pretty (bar Feyenoord) but it was effective. But then Nancy himself seems either naive or arrogant in binning that & picking quite technically limited players in unfamiliar positions in a system they’ve never played. It’s looking increasingly like this wholesale change is something that needed a pre-season as opposed to being foisted on players in the busiest phase of the season where they’re playing a game every 3 days.
So then you think…the board are so tight/prudent at the best of times. Did they even do their due diligence on this guy & realise he’d need a raft of new signings to fit into this 3-4-2-1? Do they even trust him now to still be there in 3 weeks? It’s an unholy mess from top to bottom.
It’s reminiscent of the Covid season really with Celtic lurching from one bad result to the next & apathy setting in.
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Have a feeling their going to eat it for the rest of the season but they need to spend next summer. Probably with a new coach.
Celtic Interweb abounding with rumours of a bust up between manager and CalMac. Also a supposed ultimatum from the board to change tactics or else…Wilf apparently asked for more details on the second option:joy:
Not a chance. He hasn’t had anywhere close to long enough to judge him.
I’ll caveat my assessment of yesterday’s performance by pointing out I was 24 hours on from a general anaesthetic and a little distracted and tired watching the game.
The results so far have been very poor. That’s probably causing most of the reaction. I’m more concerned with the performances which to be fair have been poor too. We probably had one ok half in each of our three games but actually on closer assessment we had 20/25 minutes spells in each game where we played quite well. The rest was either very mediocre or a long way beneath that.
I think the squad is as bad as it’s ever been. Certainly when you take Jota, Carter Vickers, Johnston out. And then the two new arrivals who looked decent (Iheanacho and Saracchi have both been more injured than not). Throw in Osmand as well for good measure. But there are 5 or 6 starters missing from the team at the moment.
I don’t know how things improve. I’d say we have created a small few more chances in the recent games than in the previous comparable ones. (So Hearts home game : Hearts away. Roma : the Danes. St Mirren final : St Mirren at home). But the passages of play haven’t been good enough to gain any sort of control over those games. And worryingly we look far more defensively vulnerable. And Nancy doesn’t seem to talk about that at all. It’s all about building connections.
There are players who aren’t good enough who we keep turning to. Ralston for example. (But O’Neill put him straight back into the team too). Kenny was possibly the least effective player on the pitch yesterday (again O’Neill played him until he saw enough and then left him on the bench when he realised what he can’t do). Tounetki isn’t good enough and I don’t know why he’s playing. Maybe because Yang is the only alternative. McCowan really infuriated me yesterday taking a minute to line up a free kick that we know he’s not going to score. But I expected Bernardo to come on.
I think we’ll improve our attacking play but we need much more than that to be able to control the outcome of games. We need to be able to have periods of possession that aren’t all about this imbalance he wants. Because actually Scales was quite effective in the first half yesterday in those unusual positions but the room we left them on the break was disastrous.
Is it worse than Kairat though? Or the Dundee game? Or a handful of matches from the second half of last season. It’s just the inevitable outcome from relying on a group of players who aren’t feared in Scotland anymore. No centre backs are worried about Johnny Kenny. No full backs are panicking when Tounetki is running at them. They all just get behind the ball and slow Celtic down knowing that will do the job.
That’s a very incoherent rant. But I think the results at the moment say more about the players available than the manager. And I don’t think the solution for that is imminent.
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