Well, the doctor is in, and he has spoken. What some of us were asking for, what some of us were hoping for, seems to have come to pass. We’ve now apparently gone for a football manager picked by the football person. Whether it works or not is another matter entirely.
I’m not calling this a Board of Directors signing. This clearly is not the guy that the likes of Desmond, Lawwell and Nicholson would ever have chosen. There are several reasons why.
For one thing, there is a Guardian piece this morning suggesting he fits neatly into Celtic’s transfer policies. That sits uneasily with other reporting.
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From all I understand about him, he is an architect manager. The sort who turned down players the club tried to push on him at Columbus. He is the sort who does not work inside restrictive transfer frameworks.
These guys want to run their own show and shape their own projects. If those accounts are more accurate than what the Guardian is pushing, some people inside our walls are in for one hell of a shock when they hear what he actually intends to do.
Or maybe they aren’t. That’s the other part of this you need to consider.
As I said weeks ago, it looks more than possible that we’re seeing something major stir behind the scenes. It’s not impossible that this is a strategic pivot. However, for reasons known only to the egos involved, and not for any sane or rational purpose, we might not be getting told that this is what’s happening.
This board doesn’t believe it has to tell us anything, good or bad. It would be entirely in character for them to make a strategic pivot and then refuse to announce it.
There are lessons from the Rodgers era.
Big lessons. Hard-to-ignore lessons. The problem with this board is that it has previous for ignoring lessons. It’s not impossible that they’re doing it all over again. They may well decide that the club will continue drifting in the direction they’ve chosen, regardless of events. If that’s what they do then we’re setting ourselves up for serious trouble.
They did a masterful job of shifting the blame to Rodgers over the summer. It was as if he was the only manager in the world who ever complained about a transfer policy. If they try to inflict the same restrictions on this guy and it all blows up again, they won’t have anywhere to hide. More importantly, the consequences for the team will be momentous.
I might be naïve and I might be a bit mad. However, the very fact he has been hired at all suggests the football department has had its way for once.
This is not the type of manager the board would have chosen on their own. This is a controversial choice, a hard sell. Not remotely the sort of decision a club usually makes when it is under pressure and in the middle of a real fight. Tisdale is sticking his neck out here. If this goes wrong, his is the first head on the block.
I don’t know whether Paul Tisdale has a great record. None of us knows whether or not Paul Tisdale is a disaster waiting to happen. I do know he has gone about this in a totally different manner. He didn’t just flip through Dermot Desmond’s little black book.
This is not the Neil Lennon appointment. Nor is it the Ronny Deila appointment. This is a football guy making a football decision, presumably for football reasons, and I can support that. Whatever my misgivings, I can support that.
The biggest lesson we should have learned is that you cannot bring in a manager and deny him the backing needed to realise his vision.
Maybe Rodgers rubbed them up the wrong way. Maybe he had more enemies than friends behind the scenes. That makes it an ego issue, which is bad enough. Some people deliberately restricted Rodgers because they didn’t like him. There is no excuse now. There is absolutely no excuse. This guy is not Rodgers.
This guy deserves the level of support the club denied the previous boss.
We’ll be hiring another architect if this goes ahead. That means you give him the parts he needs to deliver the vision he has set out. None of these signings have to be bank-breakers. They just have to be good enough to do the job. This is because a manager like this turns solid players into very good ones. He turns those players into saleable assets because people can see them performing every week.
None of this works if we treat him like a paid serf expected to fit into a system designed by non-football people who don’t fully grasp what they’re doing. There has to be some flex. They need to give ground to get the best out of this manager and this team. If they’re not willing to do that, they shouldn’t be anywhere near these decisions.
The football people have spoken. They’ve got their man. The board needs to get out of the way and let the football department support him properly. Yes, they must work within a budget. However, how the funds are allocated should be up to the football department alone. That’s how modern clubs operate. We can’t call ourselves one unless we do the same.
Nobody knows if this guy will succeed.
One thing is guaranteed, though. Unless he gets to do it his way, unless the board gives him the support they withheld from Rodgers, he will almost certainly fail. Rodgers came with experience, authority and a dressing room he inherited from a title-winning side. Still, the club almost drove itself into a ditch by refusing to back him properly.
If they repeat that mistake, if they insist on backing the manager their way instead of the way he needs, we’re heading straight for disaster. The only way we avoid it is by letting him stand and fall on his own merits.
