James Forrest
The Emperor of Ice Cream
The Celtic board has not had a vintage year. Every one of us knows that.
But if you are going to give these people stick for the things they got wrong, you have to give them some credit for the things they got right. They have made one major decision this year which worked out the way it needed to, and that was getting rid of Wilfried Nancy as quickly as was practicable.
To do otherwise would have doomed this campaign.
One of the reasons I love historical analogy, and looking outside football to shine a light on football stories, is how often things outside the game reflect trends within it.
It took a lot of nerve to sack a manager eight games into his tenure. Indeed, in some sense, it might have taken even more nerve to back him and support him. But such was the feeling against Nancy in the stands, and seemingly in the dressing room itself, that things were not going to get better. So, his departure was inevitable.
The only question was when.
Once you arrive at the point where the only question is when, the answer should usually be sooner rather than later. From the point of view of salvaging what you can and preventing further damage, you do not allow a situation you know is not going to end well to continue any longer than it has to.
Delay is not stability. Delay is damage.
That brings me to Westminster, where anyone can see that Keir Starmer is walking Labour, and quite possibly the country, towards the shark-infested waters of a possible Reform government. Across the chamber, Kemi Badenoch’s position is even worse in electoral terms, with Reform eating into the Conservative support to an existential degree.
Neither party leader appears to have the first clue how to get out of the tailspin. Neither inspires confidence or looks capable of reconnecting with the public. Yet both parties seem paralysed by fear of the consequences of acting.
Labour MPs mutter that there is no obvious replacement for Starmer, no unifying candidate, and that the mechanism for removing him is baroque unless he is willing to go. The Tories, meanwhile, fear looking even more unstable after the conveyor belt of recent leaders. They also know that any replacement for Badenoch might be even more right-wing, while still failing to win back voters from Farage.
So, both parties drift. They know where this probably ends, yet they fear the optics of doing what may have to be done. They are less afraid of failure than they are of being seen to panic. That is the trap.
That is what Celtic, for once, avoided with Nancy.
Do not misunderstand me. The whole thing was shambolic. Brendan Rodgers walked out, and the club knifed him in the back. The optics were horrible. The precedent was horrible. The reputational damage was catastrophic.
Then we had a stable situation under Martin O’Neill, only for the club to upend it by bringing in Nancy. Then they fired Nancy and brought back O’Neill.
It looked ridiculous because it was ridiculous. Those of us who lived through it will never forget how shambolic it felt.
But if O’Neill wins this title, history will remember one thing above all else. It will remember that Celtic realised the gravity of the error, recognised the inevitability of disaster and terminated the experiment before it unravelled everything.
Not every club is in a position to do that.
Not every club understands the full scale of the emergency before it is too late.
Across the city, at Ibrox, we now see a club in exactly that kind of mess. They are in serious peril, and they do not know how to get out of it.
Most observers, and certainly many of their own supporters online, now recognise that Danny Röhl is not going to do it. They can talk all they want about how he rescued them from the Russell Martin nightmare, but that same nightmare is why it is almost impossible for Ibrox to grasp the nettle now.
The Ibrox board has already fired two managers in a year. They are unarguably worse off for it, not even second in the table but facing the prospect of third. Their European campaign, when past European campaigns were often the highlight of their seasons, was a shattering experience they cannot afford to repeat.
There is no sign that the guy in the dugout has the chops for the job.
But what are the club at Ibrox going to do?
Sack him before the season ends so they can have another fresh start in the summer?
What happens if the next guy does not hit the ground running? Does he go too? This is the pattern of behaviour over there. This is the chaos that engulfs Ibrox almost every year. At some point, it starts to look ridiculous to the rest of the world.
It looks even more ridiculous when you combine it with all the talk about how they demand to win, how the club will not accept second place, and how their whole history is built on winning. But it is not built on winning anymore.
It has been nearly fifteen years since this Ibrox club crawled out of the grave of Rangers, and this is not a club which wins all the time. In that period, they have won a league title, a League Cup and a Scottish Cup. That is the total.
In that same spell, St Johnstone have won two Scottish Cups and a League Cup. Aberdeen have won a Scottish Cup and a League Cup. St Mirren have won two League Cups. Inverness, Hibs and Ross County have all won major trophies too.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about how a club’s reputation eventually stops being defined by what it claims to have been historically and starts being defined by what it is now.
The one shining light for Ibrox fans in all those years has been the title they won. That is what convinces them they are still a massive club. That is what convinces them they are somehow always on the brink of a long, successful spell.
But Hearts could be about to take even that away from them.
They could show them just how ordinary they now are, even by Scottish standards.
The descent from being a massive club to being what is euphemistically called a “historic club,” like Nottingham Forest or Leeds, is a precipitous fall. That is what the club at Ibrox is now. A club remembered for what it claims it once was rather than respected for what it now is.
And unlike Labour and the Tories, who can at least pretend they have time to recover before an election, Ibrox is stuck with a leader many of them already know is going nowhere.
They may have to stick with him despite that knowledge, because to sack him now looks insane. To sack him now looks dysfunctional. To sack him now makes them look even more ordinary, even less important, and nothing but chaotic.
The average lifespan of an Ibrox boss over the last decade and a half is about 11 months.
That tells its own story.
This is a club with no patience and no tolerance for anything but instant success. Every player they sign is immediately told that they have joined a massive club where expectations are sky high. Then those players look around a dressing room of losers and journeymen and must wonder whether these people are actually serious.
After a while, the culture of a club becomes steeped in reminiscence and failure.
Changing the manager will not fix that. Changing the manager every 11 months certainly will not fix it.
It is also financially dicey. They have already spent a lot of money, but any new manager will take one look at that squad and decide he needs to rebuild it. That costs money. Apart from paying off Röhl and trying to move on the dross he has bought, or the dross he is currently working with, they then need to find even more money to spend.
For all the talk of billionaires with deep pockets, it is not that simple. There are complicating factors like financial sustainability regulations. They cannot just keep throwing money at the problem forever. So, they are stuck.
Stuck with a manager who looks unlikely to deliver.
Unless he has a sudden change of fortune, or something dramatic happens in their boardroom, he will be there over the summer. He will lead them into European qualifiers. He will get a chance to spend some money and rebuild part of the team, but not all of it.
And we know how this story usually ends.
We know he does not know how to do this.
So, what does he get? Six more months to engineer another failure? Until October, to see how he does in Europe and how he starts the league? Until December, when the League Cup may already have gone somewhere else before they make the call?
It is the most dysfunctional football club on this island. They make even Spurs look professional, sensible and sane.
Even the craziest clubs with the craziest owners do not usually have this kind of managerial turnover, all based on the delusion that they should be able to do things they cannot do, and all based on an impossible standard set decades ago at another institution entirely.
Look at the forums over there right now. Many of them have already decided that this guy has to go. Many in the mainstream media are of a similar mind and are openly saying so. It is a disaster. A next-level disaster.
The only reason to keep him in the job is the same one Labour and the Tories are struggling with: fear of the consequences. Fear of being seen as rash and reckless. Fear of what the optics look like and how the public will view it.
Every day they delay, every day he stays, the damage gets harder to undo.
There is an analogy I like to use at a time like this; crisis is never behind an Ibrox board of directors. It is simply on the other side of the wheel, waiting for its time to come round.
Just weeks after they thought this guy might be the saviour, people are already waiting for the end all over again.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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The post The crisis at Ibrox will cost them another manager. The only question is when. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
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But if you are going to give these people stick for the things they got wrong, you have to give them some credit for the things they got right. They have made one major decision this year which worked out the way it needed to, and that was getting rid of Wilfried Nancy as quickly as was practicable.
To do otherwise would have doomed this campaign.
One of the reasons I love historical analogy, and looking outside football to shine a light on football stories, is how often things outside the game reflect trends within it.
It took a lot of nerve to sack a manager eight games into his tenure. Indeed, in some sense, it might have taken even more nerve to back him and support him. But such was the feeling against Nancy in the stands, and seemingly in the dressing room itself, that things were not going to get better. So, his departure was inevitable.
The only question was when.
Once you arrive at the point where the only question is when, the answer should usually be sooner rather than later. From the point of view of salvaging what you can and preventing further damage, you do not allow a situation you know is not going to end well to continue any longer than it has to.
Delay is not stability. Delay is damage.
That brings me to Westminster, where anyone can see that Keir Starmer is walking Labour, and quite possibly the country, towards the shark-infested waters of a possible Reform government. Across the chamber, Kemi Badenoch’s position is even worse in electoral terms, with Reform eating into the Conservative support to an existential degree.
Neither party leader appears to have the first clue how to get out of the tailspin. Neither inspires confidence or looks capable of reconnecting with the public. Yet both parties seem paralysed by fear of the consequences of acting.
Labour MPs mutter that there is no obvious replacement for Starmer, no unifying candidate, and that the mechanism for removing him is baroque unless he is willing to go. The Tories, meanwhile, fear looking even more unstable after the conveyor belt of recent leaders. They also know that any replacement for Badenoch might be even more right-wing, while still failing to win back voters from Farage.
So, both parties drift. They know where this probably ends, yet they fear the optics of doing what may have to be done. They are less afraid of failure than they are of being seen to panic. That is the trap.
That is what Celtic, for once, avoided with Nancy.
Do not misunderstand me. The whole thing was shambolic. Brendan Rodgers walked out, and the club knifed him in the back. The optics were horrible. The precedent was horrible. The reputational damage was catastrophic.
Then we had a stable situation under Martin O’Neill, only for the club to upend it by bringing in Nancy. Then they fired Nancy and brought back O’Neill.
It looked ridiculous because it was ridiculous. Those of us who lived through it will never forget how shambolic it felt.
But if O’Neill wins this title, history will remember one thing above all else. It will remember that Celtic realised the gravity of the error, recognised the inevitability of disaster and terminated the experiment before it unravelled everything.
Not every club is in a position to do that.
Not every club understands the full scale of the emergency before it is too late.
Across the city, at Ibrox, we now see a club in exactly that kind of mess. They are in serious peril, and they do not know how to get out of it.
Most observers, and certainly many of their own supporters online, now recognise that Danny Röhl is not going to do it. They can talk all they want about how he rescued them from the Russell Martin nightmare, but that same nightmare is why it is almost impossible for Ibrox to grasp the nettle now.
The Ibrox board has already fired two managers in a year. They are unarguably worse off for it, not even second in the table but facing the prospect of third. Their European campaign, when past European campaigns were often the highlight of their seasons, was a shattering experience they cannot afford to repeat.
There is no sign that the guy in the dugout has the chops for the job.
But what are the club at Ibrox going to do?
Sack him before the season ends so they can have another fresh start in the summer?
What happens if the next guy does not hit the ground running? Does he go too? This is the pattern of behaviour over there. This is the chaos that engulfs Ibrox almost every year. At some point, it starts to look ridiculous to the rest of the world.
It looks even more ridiculous when you combine it with all the talk about how they demand to win, how the club will not accept second place, and how their whole history is built on winning. But it is not built on winning anymore.
It has been nearly fifteen years since this Ibrox club crawled out of the grave of Rangers, and this is not a club which wins all the time. In that period, they have won a league title, a League Cup and a Scottish Cup. That is the total.
In that same spell, St Johnstone have won two Scottish Cups and a League Cup. Aberdeen have won a Scottish Cup and a League Cup. St Mirren have won two League Cups. Inverness, Hibs and Ross County have all won major trophies too.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about how a club’s reputation eventually stops being defined by what it claims to have been historically and starts being defined by what it is now.
The one shining light for Ibrox fans in all those years has been the title they won. That is what convinces them they are still a massive club. That is what convinces them they are somehow always on the brink of a long, successful spell.
But Hearts could be about to take even that away from them.
They could show them just how ordinary they now are, even by Scottish standards.
The descent from being a massive club to being what is euphemistically called a “historic club,” like Nottingham Forest or Leeds, is a precipitous fall. That is what the club at Ibrox is now. A club remembered for what it claims it once was rather than respected for what it now is.
And unlike Labour and the Tories, who can at least pretend they have time to recover before an election, Ibrox is stuck with a leader many of them already know is going nowhere.
They may have to stick with him despite that knowledge, because to sack him now looks insane. To sack him now looks dysfunctional. To sack him now makes them look even more ordinary, even less important, and nothing but chaotic.
The average lifespan of an Ibrox boss over the last decade and a half is about 11 months.
That tells its own story.
This is a club with no patience and no tolerance for anything but instant success. Every player they sign is immediately told that they have joined a massive club where expectations are sky high. Then those players look around a dressing room of losers and journeymen and must wonder whether these people are actually serious.
After a while, the culture of a club becomes steeped in reminiscence and failure.
Changing the manager will not fix that. Changing the manager every 11 months certainly will not fix it.
It is also financially dicey. They have already spent a lot of money, but any new manager will take one look at that squad and decide he needs to rebuild it. That costs money. Apart from paying off Röhl and trying to move on the dross he has bought, or the dross he is currently working with, they then need to find even more money to spend.
For all the talk of billionaires with deep pockets, it is not that simple. There are complicating factors like financial sustainability regulations. They cannot just keep throwing money at the problem forever. So, they are stuck.
Stuck with a manager who looks unlikely to deliver.
Unless he has a sudden change of fortune, or something dramatic happens in their boardroom, he will be there over the summer. He will lead them into European qualifiers. He will get a chance to spend some money and rebuild part of the team, but not all of it.
And we know how this story usually ends.
We know he does not know how to do this.
So, what does he get? Six more months to engineer another failure? Until October, to see how he does in Europe and how he starts the league? Until December, when the League Cup may already have gone somewhere else before they make the call?
It is the most dysfunctional football club on this island. They make even Spurs look professional, sensible and sane.
Even the craziest clubs with the craziest owners do not usually have this kind of managerial turnover, all based on the delusion that they should be able to do things they cannot do, and all based on an impossible standard set decades ago at another institution entirely.
Look at the forums over there right now. Many of them have already decided that this guy has to go. Many in the mainstream media are of a similar mind and are openly saying so. It is a disaster. A next-level disaster.
The only reason to keep him in the job is the same one Labour and the Tories are struggling with: fear of the consequences. Fear of being seen as rash and reckless. Fear of what the optics look like and how the public will view it.
Every day they delay, every day he stays, the damage gets harder to undo.
There is an analogy I like to use at a time like this; crisis is never behind an Ibrox board of directors. It is simply on the other side of the wheel, waiting for its time to come round.
Just weeks after they thought this guy might be the saviour, people are already waiting for the end all over again.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.
The post The crisis at Ibrox will cost them another manager. The only question is when. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
Continue reading...
