That’s what I can’t figure. Lawell is like terminator 2 the cunt.
No direct quotes here but Celtic seem to have briefed their favoured/compliant independent fan sites/blogs that Harkin wasn’t considered for the DOF role and was under qualified for it. Now you could be cynical and argue they would say that if it’s another target giving the club a swerve. So we’re into June now without a coach/manager, DOF, captain and with the departing CEO still seemingly calling the shots while the new guy shadows him.
I’m coming round to the idea that Zidane is about to be unveiled as the new Messiah.
Otherwise, how could a club of the “stature” of Celtic take so long to find a manager.
Or, could it be a situation that nobody, absolutely nobody wants the job.
I’m finding myself very conflicted about Whiskey Nose now that I know he hates the huns
Neil Lennon is beginning to look like the most competent person at the club last season.
It’s the month of the comeback manager, maybe they could get him back in again
100 days on…
2 CEO’s and no manager
More farcical scenes as Celtic are now looking to appoint Ange but he doesn’t have the neccessary UEFA qualifactions and Celtic have apparently applied for an exemption on this which will likely take weeks to grant.
Season start is about 6 weeks away?
Players not involved in international competitions are scheduled back in two weeks anyway
Will end up like Dundalk FC or a Vegas casino where a stooge frontman acts as the boss.
There is a long list of players and managers who have pitched up at Parkhead and declared, as part of their charm offensive, that you don’t need to think twice when Celtic come calling.
Martin O’Neill said he took “two seconds” to decide to take the job in the summer of 2000, albeit having first agonised for weeks over whether to leave Leicester City. He said his father once told him he should be prepared to walk on broken glass to Glasgow if the opportunity to play for Celtic arose, so how he could possibly say no to the manager’s job there?
In 2016, Brendan Rodgers called it one of the easiest decisions of his life, “a dream come true”. Neil Lennon was every bit as effusive about his appointment the second time around, in 2019, as he had been nine years earlier. “It was,” he said, “an honour to be asked to return.”
Eddie Howe, too, felt honoured to be approached by Celtic — first, tentatively, last November, when he declined on the basis that he was only three months into a career break after leaving Bournemouth following last season’s relegation from the Premier League, and then far more seriously in March after Lennon was sacked. From the first round of discussions with the club’s Irish owner Dermot Desmond, Celtic captured his imagination.
Howe isn’t a Celtic man. He didn’t play for the club, as Tony Mowbray and Lennon had, and he wasn’t raised in a Catholic community in Northern Ireland and immersed in the club’s history, like O’Neill, Rodgers and Lennon were. He took a more objective view of the club and he too quickly formed the view that it would be a wonderful job to take if the conditions were right.
But Howe was never persuaded that the conditions were right. For all the feverish speculation about an appointment being imminent from the start of April, there was never a “done deal”. There were always significant hurdles to overcome and, while Celtic were willing to give him time in the hope of reaching a positive outcome, the process slowly meandered towards the point where both sides needed clarity.
By Thursday evening, negotiations had drifted to a close, leaving Ange Postecoglou, coach of Japanese club Yokohama F Marinos, as the clear front-runner.
In an official statement on Friday evening, Celtic said, “Following very positive and detailed discussions with Eddie Howe, with the belief that he would be an excellent candidate for the position of Celtic manager, we allowed time for the process, given he had previously made it clear he was not looking to return to management until this summer at the earliest.
“We can now confirm that Eddie will not be joining the club for reasons outwith both his and Celtic’s control. We wish Eddie success for the future. We fully appreciate our fans will be seeking clarity on this matter and we aim, very shortly, to announce the appointment of a manager with the quality and the desire to take Celtic forward and bring further success to our supporters.”
That manager is understood to be Postecoglou, the Greek-born former Australia defender who spent four years in charge of the Australia national team before moving to Yokohama, a club that is part of the City Football Group. That might tally up with the mooted appointment of Fergal Harkin as Celtic’s director of football. As football partnerships and pathways manager at Manchester City, Harkin already belongs to the same network as Postecoglou.
Such a resolution would bring clarity and no doubt some relief for Celtic’s supporters as they wonder what happened to the supposed “done deal” with Howe.
Celtic’s Friday statement might have sounded rather vague, low on detail, but that appears to reflect the reality — and that was one of the problems as far as the meticulous, detail-obsessed Howe was concerned. For all the enthusiasm of Desmond, it has not been easy for anyone at Celtic to offer a clear vision of the way ahead for the club at a time when Peter Lawwell has stood down as chief executive, his replacement Dominic McKay has only just arrived from the Scottish Rugby Union and Nick Hammond’s departure has meant there is no director of football to map out how things work, particularly when it comes to recruitment.
Howe urged Celtic to hire an experienced operator as director of football to help with an aggressive overhaul of a squad that finished 27 points adrift of champions Rangers this season. He lobbied strongly for Celtic to appoint Bournemouth technical director Richard Hughes, but the former Scotland midfielder rejected an approach to return to his native Glasgow several weeks ago.
That didn’t end Celtic’s discussions with Howe by any means, but it was the first significant setback on the road that ended with that statement last night.
Howe was also frustrated in his efforts to assemble a coaching team, although it is not yet clear why this proved so problematic. Stephen Purches and Simon Weatherstone, who were on his backroom staff at Bournemouth, are understood to have been keen to follow him to Celtic.
In addition to those two, Howe hoped to be able to appoint an assistant manager. That was felt unlikely to be Jason Tindall, his right-hand man for many years, who is currently at Sheffield United and wants to pursue his own management ambitions after a brief spell as Howe’s successor at Bournemouth this season. Alternatives were considered but, for one reason or another, no deal was struck and, ultimately, there is no deal with Howe either.
For weeks, some of those close to Howe suspected it might be heading towards this point. Others were convinced he would take it, though, such was his apparent enthusiasm for the Celtic project. When Crystal Palace started looking for candidates to replace Roy Hodgson, Howe distanced himself from that Premier League vacancy because his focus was on Celtic.
No doubt some will feel that Howe has shirked a challenge, and others will feel he has dodged a bullet. Such is the polarised nature of the debate where Anglo-Scottish comparisons are concerned.
“I think the club he needs is Palace,” the talkSPORT presenter and former Chelsea defender Jason Cundy suggested when the Celtic link first arose. “Where do you go from Celtic? Name the manager who has gone from Celtic to manage a big club. Brendan has gone to Leicester and done a fabulous job, but where do you go after that (Celtic)?”
It is a curious argument.
If we are talking about career moves as springboards, then it is hard to escape the fact that most of Palace’s recent managers seem to have ended up at West Bromwich Albion (albeit via a brief spell at Everton in the case of Sam Allardyce). If working wonders with a smaller club brought any guarantees of a shot at the top end of the Premier League, Howe would have left Bournemouth years ago. As it is, his next step, after a sabbatical that is stretching towards an 11th month, remains unclear.
There is always too much discussion, though, about a manager’s next job and whether one opening might lead to another further down the line. The Celtic job is appealing in its own right. Had it been a case of walking into a stable structure and taking over a settled squad, Howe would surely have taken it.
Harry Redknapp, who briefly managed Howe at Portsmouth and knows him well, took a different view to Cundy.
“Do you want to go to a mid-table Premier League club and try to stay up every year?” the hugely-experienced former Tottenham and West Ham manager asked. “Or would you rather go to Celtic and try to win the title and have that great rivalry with Rangers and play in the Champions League? It’s far more exciting to go to Celtic, I think.”
It sounded it, particularly now Rangers have been reawakened and the challenge facing the next Celtic manager is to restore the club to pre-eminence rather than just fine-tune a team that previously won nine consecutive league titles, including by 29-point and 30-point margins, over the period that spanned from Lennon to Ronny Deila to Rodgers to Lennon again.
The challenge of “10 in a row” is over, but Howe was drawn to the idea of taking the fight to Steven Gerrard and wrestling supremacy back from Rangers. If successful, it would have been brought adoration of a type and a fervour so different to that which he enjoyed at Bournemouth.
The flip-side of this mouthwatering rivalry is that it can be overwhelming in its intensity. It would be wrong to characterise Howe’s existence at Bournemouth as cushy or comfortable, but even those close to him suggest much of the pressure he was under there was self-generated. Glasgow — and the Old Firm rivalry — is a different matter.
As predecessor Mark Warburton warned Gerrard upon taking the Rangers job in 2018, “You don’t realise how intense that goldfish bowl is until you enter it.”
That, it appears, is for Postecoglou to find out now.
To quote the late Tommy Burns, working for Celtic or Rangers means that one half of Glasgow hates you and the other thinks they own you. If you are struggling for results, like Lennon in his final months, then the balance becomes much less favourable than that. That would have been quite a culture shock for Howe who, venturing into Bournemouth, received benign greetings and expressions of gratitude at every turn, even when his team were enduring periods of adversity.
It wasn’t easy to imagine Howe in that environment. He has always seemed the thoughtful, quietly-driven type rather than one who would want his every substitution, every utterance and every touchline gesture analysed and fiercely debated by a fanatical fanbase and a hungry press pack.
But none of this put him off. The idea of managing Celtic appealed to him enormously. What bothered him , seemingly , were the practicalities and a series of nagging concerns that left him with the feeling that this was not the right job — at least not under these conditions at this time, when the demands on a new Celtic manager appear to be at odds with the reality of a club in the midst of their biggest upheaval in more than a decade.
A true Celtic man might not have been deterred by any of this, but Howe never claimed to be that.
He is an out-of-work manager who, awaiting his next challenge, listened intently and found himself enthralled by the stories of Celtic’s illustrious past and by the thoughts of a glorious future if, as he fantasised, he went there and got it right. All that was missing was a sense of certainty about the club’s present.
That wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for a true Celtic man, like some of those the club have appointed in the past. But for someone like Howe, it was a pretty big deal.
Celtic are at least 2 seasons away from winning the league again …scary how quick they have faded …
Who knows.
I think Celtic have a much better playing squad than Rangers but they are just a shambolic level off the pitch at the minute.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/neil-lennon-blasts-celtic-fans-24254543
What an utter fucking arsehole Lennon is.
He’s dead right. Celtic supporters need a serious reality check. They’ve become one of the most deluded, entitled and ignorant supporter bases anywhere.