A Failed Strategy?

Article by James Payne

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Celtic face Legia Warsaw this Wednesday evening at Murrayfield with its Champions’ League campaign hopes hanging by the proverbial thread.

Although many now claim they saw it coming the margin of the defeat, 4-1, and the absolutely abject display came as surprises to me. A bright start was made with Callum McGregor scoring a fine goal but after that the Celts fell apart failing to hold the lead for more than two minutes and caving in completely in the latter stages. Having somehow held the score to 2-1 for Legia during a grisly second half 2 more goals were let in during the last 8 minutes- and it could have been even worse as Legia contrived to miss two penalties in that second half. Fraser Forster was poor at the first goal but in the second half had Celtic had a lesser ‘keeper it would have been 7-1.

Celtic’s play was ragged for most of the game and two players, stand-in captain Charlie Mulgrew and Swedish right back Mikael Lustig, probably had the worst games of their careers whilst Efe Ambrose would have been added to that ignominious list were his dire display against Juventus in February 2013 not still fresh in the memory and had the Nigerian not been sent off before half time he may have surpassed that earlier personal debacle. These three players have probably attracted the most criticism but in truth save for young McGregor none of the remaining outfield players was better than poor. Other than the suspended Ambrose these same players have the chance to redeem themselves on Wednesday and if they don’t produce a barnstorming performance that, at the very least, has the Polish champions getting very nervous then some of them should be dropped for good.

The key poor performance in Warsaw was though not on the park but off it with new manager Ronny Deila having a disastrous evening. Bizarre team selections including replacing a left back with a right back whose last appearance on the left was a 6-1 loss in Barcelona whilst picking the unknown loan signing Jo Inge Berget who had signed 48 hours earlier was a desperate gamble that completely failed to work as the new Norwegian failed to make any impact. Add to these errors there were baffling substitutions during the second half and the expressions and body language of some of the players suggested the manager hadn’t told them what role each of them was meant to be performing. The result was a midfield playing a pressing game up the field and a defence that was playing far too far behind them. Legia repeatedly had loads of room to run into in the Celtic half of the field. It was a shambles.

There are already murmurings amongst Celtic fans I know suggesting that Ronny Deila should be dispensed with now. That seems a touch early but fans are right to wonder whether Deila is not the inspired choice the club (and its apologists in blogs thought to be favoured by the Celtic hierarchy) said he was. We were told that he had performed miracles at Stromgodset and was a progressive thinker a la Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and Diego Simeone. Someone who was a strong disciplinarian and who would have the players fitter than ever. The fears were that he had succeeded, fairly modestly, in a league worse than Scotland’s and like other appointments from similarly ranked leagues [most recently Pat Fenlon at Hibs] who came to Scotland and were hopeless he’d be out of his depth especially as he was also coming to a bigger club than any those other managers flopped at. It is very early to judge Ronny Deila but he got pretty much everything wrong in Warsaw. Having said he wasn’t interested in making loan signings one week and then going out and signing a compatriot on loan the next is not a great sign either. There are no clear signs of any real new approach-though there does at least seem to be a welcome break from the ceaseless passing across the field that epitomised the Neil Lennon reign- and the players don’t look any leaner or fitter. Deila needs to get his team to do something really good, really quickly or the doubts about him will grow.

The chief worry about Deila for me though was the he was signed because he was cheap. It was a long standing and widely believed rumour that Rangers- going bust in their original incarnation and haemorrhaging cash in its new guise though it was and is- paid Ally McCoist a higher salary than Neil Lennon and that now Deila will be getting paid less than Neil Lennon. It seems bizarre if these tales are true but Celtic’s approach to finance is almost unique in that the more money it takes in the less of that money gets spent on the football.

Just over a decade ago Celtic was approximately £30m in debt. Under Martin O’Neill’s management Celtic paid players such as Larsson, Sutton, Hartson, Thompson, Lennon (and probably other players) salaries that were pretty much on a par with those at English Premiership clubs outside the then ‘big 4’ of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea. A couple of very good UEFA Cup runs and several domestic trophies was a decent return for such relative largesse. But it could have been better both at home and in Europe and by the autumn of 2004 with Henrik Larsson gone O’Neill’s Celtic was a spent force. That debt was felt to be too high and so it was that the club’s de facto owner Dermot Desmond, after realising that there was, after all, no chance of us getting to play in the EPL, decided that the brakes had to be put on the club’s spending. His enforcer was to be the Chief Executive Peter Lawwell who had joined not long after the narrow loss to Porto in the 2003 UEFA Cup final in Seville.

Lawwell is a figure who causes discussion amongst the support. He is widely admired for some of the things he has done but also heavily, even hysterically, criticised for other things. I certainly think that he has carried out his original brief admirably as Celtic are now largely debt free. Rangers was already drifting towards the rocks before Lawwell appeared on the scene and the former ICI executive ensured , quickly, that there would be no chance of Celtic being as engulfed as Rangers was obviously set to be. With a greatly reduced debt - and with a cheaper squad than in the O’Neill days- Gordon Strachan twice led Celtic to the last 16 of the Champions League and won 3 out of 4 League titles. Admittedly a big mistake was made in appointing the costly, useless Tony Mowbray but with good husbandry and a promising managerial performance from Neil Lennon Celtic’s approach was seen to be the correct one with Celtic having already overhauled Rangers in the championship race before that club sank in a sea of debt.

Since those heady days of early 2012 Celtic has had two Champions League campaigns which will have boosted the coffers by around £30m and taken in similar sum for players such as Ki, Hooper, Wanyama, Wilson and Ledley when they moved to English teams. In the same period Celtic has not signed one player for more than £2.9m and the squad is thinner in terms of both quality and quantity than it was two year ago. Last season after beating Cliftonville in the 2nd Champions’ League qualifier striker Gary Hooper was sold and to the disbelief of all barring the most sycophantic supporter of Lawwell no new striker was signed to replace the Englishman until after qualification for the cup was secured after a narrow and very late win over Shakter Karagandy. And even then the striker we got was the hardly prolific Teemu Pukki of Schalke 04 as opposed to the free scoring but more expensive Alfred Finnbogason. For a club which regularly tells its fans that qualification for the Champions League is essential it seemed an odd strategy that it was unwilling to take any significant steps to strengthen the likelihood of that qualification. Having qualified by the skin of its teeth last season it was reasonable to expect that Celtic would spend some money to boost this season’s chances. But this summer not a single penny has been spent on players – the two newcomers being an injury prone out of contract ‘keeper, Craig Gordon, and the loan signing Berget. Let me remind you. Legia Warsaw 4 Celtic 1. And this is only in the penultimate round of qualifying.

Celtic has an owner and a chief executive who believe that they are Celtic and that only they know what is good for Celtic. What Lawwell evidently thinks is that what Celtic needs is to build shops and museums outside Celtic Park and that these vanity projects should be funded with money raised from season ticket sales paid by fans who pay their money to see the best possible team on the field and also with the money received from UEFA paid to Celtic as a result of the efforts of the players on the field. If, as seems very likely, Fraser Forster is sold it is unlikely that Ronny Deila will see much of the money received. This ‘strategy’ is not a bizarre one for what is meant to be a football club it is a wrong one.

These are more fraught times for Celtic than I thought they’d be. I think overhauling Legia will be difficult but with a fighting show and a decent signing or two for the next round of European ties- whether it be Champions League or Europa League- we could well get the show on the road again at the very least. The players are capable of rising to the occasion, the manager may be but I suspect that Lawwell will do what he usually does to help Celtic do well on the pitch. What suits him and Dermot and as cheaply as possible.

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