The Celtic supporters are like hospital visitors who have been asked to gather in the family room, having been told to ready themselves for news they’ve been dreading about a loved one.
Now, as well as bracing themselves for what may or may not be the details of Ange Postecoglou’s departure for Tottenham Hotspur, they have one other thing to do to tidy up their affairs. If the worst happens, the fans need to examine the contents of their hearts and minds to assess how they will remember, and judge, the man who’s left them for another club.
When cherished personalities leave Celtic, it’s customary for supporters to console themselves with the idea that person’s departure was as the direct result of a media-based conspiracy. A cold-blooded, malevolent strategy to undermine the club and bolster their greatest rivals, the team across the road on the other side of the city.
The reality is entirely different. The bottom line is managers do what they can, win what they can, but can’t worry themselves with what people think about them when they go. Ange isn’t being driven away. Results certainly aren’t dictating he has to go away. If he goes it’s because, ultimately, he wants to get away. What’s the point of having a mind if you can’t change it?
Postecoglou is allowed to do that, and so are the fans. The manager arrived from Yokohama as the classic example of the unknown quantity who went on to become idolised after proving that premature judgements can be totally inaccurate in the final analysis. The fans who said they’d never heard of him and couldn’t even pronounce his name properly now know better.
Ange last night joined the litany of managerial greats at Celtic by becoming the fifth member of a Treble-wining elite. A handful for the history books. There should be no attempt to remove his name from those pages in a fit of retrospective pique if his move to London is confirmed.
I always remember a caller who said to me on the radio he’d never again bring himself to mention Brendan Rodgers by name after he had upped and left Glasgow for Leicester with all the stealth of a
suspect leaving the scene of a crime. The offence being the breaking of peoples’ hearts through breach of promise. A promise about staying for 10-in-a-row, which was never said out loud to the best of my recollection.
Rodgers became persona non grata for doing what was best for himself and fulfilling his wish to return to the top flight of English football. This course of action was interpreted as the breach of a sacred trust.
A charge that may be made by some against Postecoglou, in spite of beating Inverness Caley Thistle and lifting five of the last six domestic trophies, but should be dropped on the grounds of common sense if ties are severed. To turn your back on Celtic is morally indefensible for those who can also prove on occasion that the sacred trust is not laid down in tablets of stone.
Rodgers’ successor Neil Lennon, for example, was part of a grotesque season that imploded like a block of
high-rise flats fitted with explosives set off by a detonator. The price of not winning 10-in-a-row was to be verbally brutalised by protestors outside the ground demanding his dismissal.
This is the way the managerial game works on a one-way street. If you’re winning, you’re revered. If you’re losing, you’re unworthy of high office and only fit for contempt. This was the noxious environment Postecoglou inherited on arrival from Japan. High among his achievements since then has been the way he’s restored dignity to the club, the one where, the season before, players were being bussed to and from the ground on match days to ensure their personal safety.
He did so by strength of personality, the dominant characteristic of which is decency. The way Ange conducted and articulated himself established Postecoglou as a class act. None of that should be expunged from the record if he goes to Spurs. There’s no need to punish the man with the status of a non-person because he exercised free will.
Spurs didn’t ask Michael Beale to fill their vacancy because, compared to a man with 25 years’ experience in
that line of work, the man at Ibrox is a relative beginner. And Spurs’ CEO Daniel Levy isn’t looking for a relative beginner. Postecoglou is a serial winner at Celtic. Beale has won the square root of you know what at Ibrox.
But, by common consent, Beale’s prospects of doing so will have been increased if Ange leaves the country. And this is where Celtic chairman Peter Lawwell comes in. Peter went down with the ship when 10-in-a-row sank without trace. He came back from that watery grave elevated from chief executive to the chairmanship in succession to Ian Bankier.
It has all been plain sailing since then because Ange is Celtic and nobody else really matters. Unless he’s not there. Lawwell could now have the succession strategy in his hands and be front and centre for a support with a notoriously low tolerance threshold if they suspect inefficiency or, worse still, incompetence. The problem for the fans in the meantime is that they are powerless.
If they go into the superstore outside Celtic Park they can spend their money and make their choice. If they go into the ground after spending their money, they have no choice. Managers come. Managers go. The fans can react to the choice of successor but they can’t influence the selection process. That’s down to Lawwell and the so-far relatively-anonymous chief executive Michael Nicholson.
That thought might have occurred to Lawwell at Hampden last night, the scene of an episode where apparently he offered Lennon the manager’s job on a permanent basis while Neil was in the shower after beating Hearts in the Scottish Cup Final. That didn’t end well for either of them. Peter’s now waiting to find out if he has to start looking for someone to succeed the seemingly irreplaceable. Celtic have all the trophies and all the money.
There is no evidence anymore of anything being like the shambles Postecoglou inherited. The manager’s job is infinitely more attractive than it was two years ago, if it has to be filled. All that remains to be established is whether or not there’s a vacancy.
READ NEXT:
