James Forrest
The Emperor of Ice Cream
Earlier in the season, I marvelled at the treatment meted out to the Ibrox boss, Russell Martin.
I said at the time I’d never seen anything like it in the Scottish mainstream media.
The sheer determination to run the guy down, to damage his standing before he’d even had a proper chance to settle into the job. It was amazing.
Looking back now, they were clearly just warming up.
Over the next few weeks and months, every time Celtic has a poor game we’re going to see that Martin’s treatment was positively inspirational by comparison. The knives are already out for our own boss. There is no dispute about that. They’re sharpening them openly.
One absolute fool in the press, Callum Crow of The Daily Mail, has already made the comparison after a single afternoon of football and without a trace of understanding that those men arrived here with distinctly different records.
On top of that, he and his paper had the arrogance to stick that drivel behind a paywall.
As though it represents insightful journalism and not the sort of thing Ruprecht the Monkey Boy would have doodled down on his scribble-board.
This is what we’re dealing with; clowns drumming up a circus.
Of course, there may be plenty of questions which follow naturally from this in time to come.
Was Nancy qualified to be Celtic manager? Was Tisdale qualified to appoint him? Can the same people who bungled the last transfer window be trusted to handle the next one properly? My answers at the time of writing are: yes to the first, probably to the second, and absolutely not to the third.
But we can’t properly address those issues until we’re a little bit further on than his first weekend at work.
Right now, Celtic fans have a single, straightforward responsibility: support the manager.
And honestly, what alternative do we have?
This is the guy. It doesn’t matter who wanted the job instead.
It doesn’t matter who thought they knew better candidates.
Nor does it matter who clamoured for O’Neill to get the gig longer-term.
None of that happened. Wilfried Nancy is the manager of Celtic — and he has managed exactly one game.
If you are writing him off then stop pretending you hadn’t done it on Thursday morning last week.
You didn’t wait for Sunday.
All that did was offer you a sliver of evidence to support the decision you’d already made. That’s called confirmation bias. It’s a form of what’s known as a logical fallacy; in short, it proves you’re governing by emotion not reason.
If you are calling for his sacking after 90 minutes, the problem isn’t him. The problem is not his qualifications, his experience, or his coaching ability. The problem is what’s rattling around inside your own head. “Spoiled” and “entitled” don’t even get close to capturing it.
Some of the loudest critics today are people who only weeks ago were shouting abuse at fellow Celtic supporters.
Why? Because they we protested against the board.
“Back the team and the manager!” was their demand.
Look at them now. Those same voices, who told us we were hurting the team, are now screaming for the manager’s scalp.
The word “hypocrite” doesn’t stretch far enough for behaviour like that.
But I won’t be combing through screenshots or naming names. I’ve seen some of it, and frankly, they’re fortunate that they are not worth the effort naming and shaming them would take. But they know who they are and so do I.
Some of the attacks on Nancy started before he even officially took charge. It began with those in the media who pushed the idea that Martin O’Neill should get the job until the cup final, the end of the year, or even beyond. That noise never let up. Those stories were being pushed from the moment we knew Nancy was coming in early in December.
The truth is that Nancy should have been in the door during the international break. He wasn’t because the board refused to pay the full release clause in his contract. Instead, they waited until it automatically dropped on December 1st — and wasted crucial time to save a miserable million pounds. As a result, he arrived only two days before the Hearts match.
That delay was nothing to do with Nancy — and everything to do with the people running the club. It was crucial he get time to assess the squad ahead of January, and every day counts. The longer we left it, the less time we had.
Watching that Hearts performance, you can see how much work lies ahead. Nancy knows it. He knows the road between now and January will be painful. He knows things might be rough as he tries to implement his ideas — but he’s working in service of a larger goal: embedding a new way of playing that can actually make a bigger difference.
Some people won’t like that. Some people don’t like change.
But changing things is precisely why he was hired. And hearing people claim he’s somehow questioning O’Neill’s judgment by altering tactics is nonsensical. Changing tactics isn’t a crime — especially when the “old” systems produced a last-minute winner at St Mirren without a shot on target before the goal.
Maybe the tactics deserved questioning. Maybe the squad framework deserves questioning. Perhaps the makeup of this team — and the people responsible for constructing it — deserve questioning most of all. Things needed to change. We were stuck in the mud, and we are committed to it now.
And what does Nancy find around him as he gets to work?
Critics in the stands, critics in the media, critics everywhere. People waiting to stick the knife into his front or his back at the first opportunity.
What’s worse is that the club has made critical mistakes already — starting with not appointing him sooner. Denying him the standard public unveiling afforded every Celtic manager before him sent a terrible message. From the outside, it looked like the club itself viewed him as a lesser appointment than those others.
But nothing has been more damaging than denying him direct engagement with fan media.
I spoke at length about this on the podcast last night. Whatever people think of fan media, it has long served as the Celtic managers’ Praetorian Guard — defending them against the relentless pressure that once would have finished them.
The last manager treated with this level of suspicion was Ange. And what did the club do right then? Dominic McKay organised an event where Ange sat in front of ordinary fans and answered direct questions. The mainstream media hated it. They squealed that we’d crossed onto their turf. Celtic’s own media team worried too — but that single event, and the articles and podcasts which followed, pledging to get behind him, sold countless wavering supporters on Ange as the right man.
On the day, Dave Faulds of The Celtic Star stood up and told Ange the brutal truth: your friends are in this room — don’t trust the people outside it. And every fan-media outlet there took that lesson to heart. They defended him in the brutal early months while the mainstream press was writing his obituary.
By denying Nancy that opportunity, the club robbed him of a chance to present himself — and robbed us of a chance to know him. Already you can see the consequences.
Members of fan media are questioning tactics and team selections without properly understanding the broader ideas at work — and why wouldn’t they? They haven’t heard the man speak for himself. All of this could have been addressed if he’d simply been allowed to sit down, talk openly, and explain to fans what he’s about.
It feels increasingly like some on the board are doing everything possible to make this season harder than it needed to be. It has cost us Rodgers and torched normal relations with the fans. Now Nancy is absorbing the fallout.
Let’s be crystal clear: Nancy is not a long-tenured director presiding over endless Champions League collapses and failed transfer windows. He’s not an absentee shareholder poisoning the well from a distance and sending his son to make inflammatory statements because he’s too gutless to front up in person. Nor is this a CEO who we criticised for long enough because he didn’t talk and who we now hope never does again.
Wilfried Nancy is now our manager. Whether you like him or not.
Whether you like his tactics or not or you trust his vision or not. This is the guy.
He isn’t going anywhere after one game — or five — even if the sensationalists scream for blood. And unless fans learn to support the rebuild instead of undermining it, we risk going down the same chaotic road as the club across the city — endless churn, endless instability, and endless wasted seasons.
We already sit on our third manager of 2025. Ibrox just edges us with four — and we know exactly why they’re in that mess: public pressure fuelled by a media ecosystem that despises anyone who doesn’t fit its caricature.
Some in that media have already labelled our own boss a “philosopher type”, as if having intellect disqualifies someone from running a football team. In my book, the only people who distrust intellectualism are those threatened by it — or resentful of what they lack themselves.
Yet this ecosystem thrives on the rubbish. The tactics board. Jackie McNamara pontificating about Celtic players being frustrated without the slightest idea what goes on inside Celtic’s dressing room. Former players like Charlie Mulgrew talking about O’Neill getting a new gig inside Celtic even as he speculates that the manager might not like it; national newspapers treat this incoherence as if it is insight.
One reporter even claimed yesterday that we played a 3-4-3 with Yang and Tounekti as wing-backs — a tactical impossibility that would turn the system into a 5-4-1. That man is paid to cover football and doesn’t even understand basic formations.
This is the nonsense fans are expected to listen to — alongside grinning ex-Ibrox figures licking their lips at turmoil at our club. Of course they think we’ve made a mistake on this guy. It would fry their brains to think we might have made another successful appointment. We shouldn’t be listening to any of their drivel.
If you want to help them dig the grave for this guy, go right ahead — but don’t pretend you’re doing it for Celtic. You’re doing it for yourself, for whatever reason.
So let me say it one final time:
Wilfried Nancy is the manager of Celtic. He will be here for some time. And if you aren’t prepared to give him basic support and the benefit of the doubt after one game, then the tabloids don’t even need to attack this club — they just need to let to some of our own supporters the hammers and watch as they do it for them.
The post Nancy is the Celtic boss. Like it or not, we better all get behind him. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
Continue reading...
I said at the time I’d never seen anything like it in the Scottish mainstream media.
The sheer determination to run the guy down, to damage his standing before he’d even had a proper chance to settle into the job. It was amazing.
Looking back now, they were clearly just warming up.
Over the next few weeks and months, every time Celtic has a poor game we’re going to see that Martin’s treatment was positively inspirational by comparison. The knives are already out for our own boss. There is no dispute about that. They’re sharpening them openly.
One absolute fool in the press, Callum Crow of The Daily Mail, has already made the comparison after a single afternoon of football and without a trace of understanding that those men arrived here with distinctly different records.
On top of that, he and his paper had the arrogance to stick that drivel behind a paywall.
As though it represents insightful journalism and not the sort of thing Ruprecht the Monkey Boy would have doodled down on his scribble-board.
This is what we’re dealing with; clowns drumming up a circus.
Of course, there may be plenty of questions which follow naturally from this in time to come.
Was Nancy qualified to be Celtic manager? Was Tisdale qualified to appoint him? Can the same people who bungled the last transfer window be trusted to handle the next one properly? My answers at the time of writing are: yes to the first, probably to the second, and absolutely not to the third.
But we can’t properly address those issues until we’re a little bit further on than his first weekend at work.
Right now, Celtic fans have a single, straightforward responsibility: support the manager.
And honestly, what alternative do we have?
This is the guy. It doesn’t matter who wanted the job instead.
It doesn’t matter who thought they knew better candidates.
Nor does it matter who clamoured for O’Neill to get the gig longer-term.
None of that happened. Wilfried Nancy is the manager of Celtic — and he has managed exactly one game.
If you are writing him off then stop pretending you hadn’t done it on Thursday morning last week.
You didn’t wait for Sunday.
All that did was offer you a sliver of evidence to support the decision you’d already made. That’s called confirmation bias. It’s a form of what’s known as a logical fallacy; in short, it proves you’re governing by emotion not reason.
If you are calling for his sacking after 90 minutes, the problem isn’t him. The problem is not his qualifications, his experience, or his coaching ability. The problem is what’s rattling around inside your own head. “Spoiled” and “entitled” don’t even get close to capturing it.
Some of the loudest critics today are people who only weeks ago were shouting abuse at fellow Celtic supporters.
Why? Because they we protested against the board.
“Back the team and the manager!” was their demand.
Look at them now. Those same voices, who told us we were hurting the team, are now screaming for the manager’s scalp.
The word “hypocrite” doesn’t stretch far enough for behaviour like that.
But I won’t be combing through screenshots or naming names. I’ve seen some of it, and frankly, they’re fortunate that they are not worth the effort naming and shaming them would take. But they know who they are and so do I.
Some of the attacks on Nancy started before he even officially took charge. It began with those in the media who pushed the idea that Martin O’Neill should get the job until the cup final, the end of the year, or even beyond. That noise never let up. Those stories were being pushed from the moment we knew Nancy was coming in early in December.
The truth is that Nancy should have been in the door during the international break. He wasn’t because the board refused to pay the full release clause in his contract. Instead, they waited until it automatically dropped on December 1st — and wasted crucial time to save a miserable million pounds. As a result, he arrived only two days before the Hearts match.
That delay was nothing to do with Nancy — and everything to do with the people running the club. It was crucial he get time to assess the squad ahead of January, and every day counts. The longer we left it, the less time we had.
Watching that Hearts performance, you can see how much work lies ahead. Nancy knows it. He knows the road between now and January will be painful. He knows things might be rough as he tries to implement his ideas — but he’s working in service of a larger goal: embedding a new way of playing that can actually make a bigger difference.
Some people won’t like that. Some people don’t like change.
But changing things is precisely why he was hired. And hearing people claim he’s somehow questioning O’Neill’s judgment by altering tactics is nonsensical. Changing tactics isn’t a crime — especially when the “old” systems produced a last-minute winner at St Mirren without a shot on target before the goal.
Maybe the tactics deserved questioning. Maybe the squad framework deserves questioning. Perhaps the makeup of this team — and the people responsible for constructing it — deserve questioning most of all. Things needed to change. We were stuck in the mud, and we are committed to it now.
And what does Nancy find around him as he gets to work?
Critics in the stands, critics in the media, critics everywhere. People waiting to stick the knife into his front or his back at the first opportunity.
What’s worse is that the club has made critical mistakes already — starting with not appointing him sooner. Denying him the standard public unveiling afforded every Celtic manager before him sent a terrible message. From the outside, it looked like the club itself viewed him as a lesser appointment than those others.
But nothing has been more damaging than denying him direct engagement with fan media.
I spoke at length about this on the podcast last night. Whatever people think of fan media, it has long served as the Celtic managers’ Praetorian Guard — defending them against the relentless pressure that once would have finished them.
The last manager treated with this level of suspicion was Ange. And what did the club do right then? Dominic McKay organised an event where Ange sat in front of ordinary fans and answered direct questions. The mainstream media hated it. They squealed that we’d crossed onto their turf. Celtic’s own media team worried too — but that single event, and the articles and podcasts which followed, pledging to get behind him, sold countless wavering supporters on Ange as the right man.
On the day, Dave Faulds of The Celtic Star stood up and told Ange the brutal truth: your friends are in this room — don’t trust the people outside it. And every fan-media outlet there took that lesson to heart. They defended him in the brutal early months while the mainstream press was writing his obituary.
By denying Nancy that opportunity, the club robbed him of a chance to present himself — and robbed us of a chance to know him. Already you can see the consequences.
Members of fan media are questioning tactics and team selections without properly understanding the broader ideas at work — and why wouldn’t they? They haven’t heard the man speak for himself. All of this could have been addressed if he’d simply been allowed to sit down, talk openly, and explain to fans what he’s about.
It feels increasingly like some on the board are doing everything possible to make this season harder than it needed to be. It has cost us Rodgers and torched normal relations with the fans. Now Nancy is absorbing the fallout.
Let’s be crystal clear: Nancy is not a long-tenured director presiding over endless Champions League collapses and failed transfer windows. He’s not an absentee shareholder poisoning the well from a distance and sending his son to make inflammatory statements because he’s too gutless to front up in person. Nor is this a CEO who we criticised for long enough because he didn’t talk and who we now hope never does again.
Wilfried Nancy is now our manager. Whether you like him or not.
Whether you like his tactics or not or you trust his vision or not. This is the guy.
He isn’t going anywhere after one game — or five — even if the sensationalists scream for blood. And unless fans learn to support the rebuild instead of undermining it, we risk going down the same chaotic road as the club across the city — endless churn, endless instability, and endless wasted seasons.
We already sit on our third manager of 2025. Ibrox just edges us with four — and we know exactly why they’re in that mess: public pressure fuelled by a media ecosystem that despises anyone who doesn’t fit its caricature.
Some in that media have already labelled our own boss a “philosopher type”, as if having intellect disqualifies someone from running a football team. In my book, the only people who distrust intellectualism are those threatened by it — or resentful of what they lack themselves.
Yet this ecosystem thrives on the rubbish. The tactics board. Jackie McNamara pontificating about Celtic players being frustrated without the slightest idea what goes on inside Celtic’s dressing room. Former players like Charlie Mulgrew talking about O’Neill getting a new gig inside Celtic even as he speculates that the manager might not like it; national newspapers treat this incoherence as if it is insight.
One reporter even claimed yesterday that we played a 3-4-3 with Yang and Tounekti as wing-backs — a tactical impossibility that would turn the system into a 5-4-1. That man is paid to cover football and doesn’t even understand basic formations.
This is the nonsense fans are expected to listen to — alongside grinning ex-Ibrox figures licking their lips at turmoil at our club. Of course they think we’ve made a mistake on this guy. It would fry their brains to think we might have made another successful appointment. We shouldn’t be listening to any of their drivel.
If you want to help them dig the grave for this guy, go right ahead — but don’t pretend you’re doing it for Celtic. You’re doing it for yourself, for whatever reason.
So let me say it one final time:
Wilfried Nancy is the manager of Celtic. He will be here for some time. And if you aren’t prepared to give him basic support and the benefit of the doubt after one game, then the tabloids don’t even need to attack this club — they just need to let to some of our own supporters the hammers and watch as they do it for them.
The post Nancy is the Celtic boss. Like it or not, we better all get behind him. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
Continue reading...
