Roy Keane’s “Celtic wanted me but they weren’t showing how much they wanted me” comment in his second autobiography about being courted to replace Neil Lennon as our manager in the summer is no doubt accurate on one level, but inaccurate on another. Some within Celtic certainly wanted him, but I’m sure the reticence he picked up (and was shared by many of us on the blog at the time) was also very real. Celtic wanted him, but their approach showed him how unconvinced they were.
Keane’s managerial CV is at best considered patchy and his reputation has sold more autobiographies of former team-mates and managers than the two volumes he has now published. Few were convinced he was the right manager for the job, although I’ve no doubt Keane’s claim that Dermot Desmond wanted him, and told him “The job is yours” is accurate, whether anyone else at Celtic was in on the plan or not.
Many thanks to everyone who sponsored me for Sunday’s Great Scottish Run 10k in aid of Celtic Foundation. So far, £677 has been raised to help OUR foundation’s work with poverty, education, learning and equality. The help and messages of support kept the legs moving.
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south of tunis- ‘Be Careful What you Wish For’ ,by ex Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan is a cracking book.
petethebeat
When the chips are down little things like that may make the difference.
Ah the Clyde game
My wife was in labour from 10am that Sunday morning and my beautiful daughter was born at 6.45am Monday morning.
I can’t remember at what stage I heard the Celtic result but I couldn’t have cared less after what we’d all been through!
proudbhoy
Dave Kitson is pretty much outed as the secret footballer but it is not clear it is him. My own theory is that it is a few players disguised as one guy. 2nd book was decent but much the same as the 1st really.
Cascarino really has confidence issues. He did not rate himself. He explains in very blunt terms how footballers go from £8k a month to skint very quickly through a failed marriage and other costs. Quite eye opening. Players in the 80’s/90’s did not make anywhere near the sums today as we all know.
It’s a very frank account of his life and there are a lot of self doubts about his ability. He sort of argues with himself in the book about how poor he is. It’s been interesting so far. I get the impression he doesn’t like himself too much and then there is the exclusive that he is not actually qualified to play for ROI at all but that has just been mentioned in the book at this stage and not explained in detail. Some of the ROI players already knew though. Niall Quinn certainly knew. I will give a better review when finished it. Looks a decent read so far. Certainly better than some other football books that give you know background and little honesty. Ian Rush is the worst football book I have read. Mr Boring!
LB
Thunder Road
They were also told that instead of eating the last chip, they should carefully place it on their shoulder.
I made that up.
Another day another former player who never managed a day in their lives lays the boots into Ronny, via the Daily Record no less. Hartson, Sutton or Ronny ? I know which one I have time for, the others can GTF.
An Dun
Sutton managed Lincoln City.
LB
PeteTheBeat
10:47 on 8 October, 2014
The Welsh rugby team a few years ago were told if they were going to eat chips, it was better to have the thick cut variety on the grounds that they absorbed less oil / fat.
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Hmmm. I’d have thought the greater surface area of the large chip would afford more opporunity for the absorbtion of fat/oil. However, the proportion of potato to oil would surely be less. What a quandry!
Jimmy Johnstone, Jock Stein all gave interviews/did adverts for the daily record /Sunday mail – should they gtf also?
!! Bada Bing !!.
Be Careful What You Wish For ——–Simon Jordan ..
Yes ————-an excellent read . . One of this summer s beach treats.
LiviBhoy
11:08 on 8 October, 2014
An Dun
Sutton managed Lincoln City.
LB
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Fiar enough, I stand corrected. He’s still a media whore.
I do not know how much involvement Chris Sutton has in penning his column.
The usual format for these fluff pieces , the journalist calls the player and asks him about the hot topic of the day,
Many players have admitted that they put their name to the column without even seeing it ( or even being consulted).
This gives the journalist the free reign to get on his own hobby horse.
No surprise the Rectum slant would be to have a pop at Celtic under cover of the players name at the top.
Remember Chris Sutton is bankrupt and the Record is a source of income
“What profiteth a man if he gains the whole world but lose his own soul” Mathew 8:36
For the whole world …… I perhaps could understand….. but for The Daily Rectum . Onlooker 8:10:14
The Onlooker
Natknow
You may be right about the thick and thin chips business.
Maybe some of our experts could help here.
Leo Burdock up at Christchurch in Dublin serves the best fish and chips in the world. Leo generally has a pint of stout on the counter to slake his thirst as he prepares his gourmet health food.
The Onlooker
How a footballer who made cash like Chris Sutton is bankrupt I have no idea. These guys must make crazy decisions during their playing career. Maybe Ronny should get a few of these boys in and give the players an insight into what happens after their career is over. Maybe a few of the players will actually buy into the fitness strategy more and want to make the most out of the game rather than wasting millions down the bookies, pub or casino. I noticed that some of our players WAG’s are now selling their clothes and shows on Ebay. Items are £900 and now selling for half that price. Yes £900 of our money spent on clothing worn once and sometimes not worn at all and sold on. No wonder these players end up skint after their career is over. For double the price of the average season ticket our players wives and girlfriends are buying shoes they wear once or not at all. Now this is common place in football and I’m sure that being fitter and more focused won;t change that but this is the life these guys lead. Totally removed from the reality of the fans. Maybe Garry O’Connor would be a good start to speak to our first team players. Would love to know if he regretted not following JC’s methods at Hibernian. He made millions, is now bankrupt at 31 and living in a council house and trying to get his career back on track at Selkirk. Very sad! Cracking player on his day too.
LB
PeteTheBeat
11:14 on 8 October, 2014
Natknow
You may be right about the thick and thin chips business.
Maybe some of our experts could help here.
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Good call. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert with chips. More of a gifted amateur. I had some lovely chips in Crail recently. Even better was the fish. Although I have to say that the best fish supper I’ve ever had was in Western Australia. I think they had just caught the fish and gutted it. “Flake” it was – probably shark.
Of course, it all depends on context. I prefer the frites with red meat or mussels…
Sutton,after going bankrupt,he will take any kind of money,and say the things the DR want him to say.Fud.
How did he do as manager of Lincoln?.Sacked for being a fud of a manager.
You’re right. Gerry Creaney should have been playing for Albion Rovers but instead Celtic hoovered him and in the process runied the Coatbridge Muiryhall Street North Junior League. How far from G40 should Celtic be allowed to recruit from?
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Ok then we’ll have a team of young wannabees from the other side of the globe and loanee foreign misfits and mercenaries form other club then. Personally, I get more a buzz watching and supporting a team that has a strong local connection even if they do hail from Coatbridge. Most of my childhood was spent in Castlemilk and I look forward to seeing young Calvin Miller make his hoops debut more than some kid from China or some other distant part of the globe. He went to my old primary school which only heightens my interest. Yes I understand the need for foreign heroes as well but I think when we field a team and it doesn’t include a single home based player then something’s not quite right with the balance.
I don’t have a problem with former players making a few quid through the media.
After all,we can hardly complain that every pundit seems to be a hun if we tell our own to steer clear of it.
I don’t think they need to be critical just for the hell of it,though.
Neil Lennon won three in a row,as did Gordon Strachan. Both got regular pelters from players who had lived high on the hog from their association with us.
Former players who probably expected never to have to buy a pint-or a poke of chips-whenever they graced a Celtic fan with their presence.
But more than happy to put the boot in for those thirty pieces of silver.
Ex-huns don’t do it,even in the aforementioned six years when their team were pish.
Now that they’re worse,they still don’t.
IMO,no problem trading on your association with Celtic. But don’t use it to traduce us.
Cos that’s a quick way to ‘Who? F..k him’ status.
Doctors tell us that an occasional fish and chip is good for mental wellbeing and the feel good factor and I agree nothing compares.
sous vide chips would be the healthiest
LIVIBHOY
Garry O’Connor of a few years back would have flourished under Ronny.
He’s banned coke!
I spent a year in Sydney 15 years ago.
there was a chippie at the bottom of the hill at balmoral beach that did the best calamari and chips I’ve ever tasted!
HH jamesgang
Absolutely delighted Roy Keane’s comments on John Hartson have surfaced this week after all the uproar and scrutiny on Deila’s diet comments!!!
Roy Keane was a player with reasonable talent, who through hard work and determination turned himself into one of the best midfielders in Europe.
Why shouldn’t our manager be pushing our (mostly average) players to find ways (such as a strict diet and increased fitness) to maximise their talent???
Livibhoy,
Excellent ESPN Documentary BROKE covered the topic of sportsmen and personal finance…
+++++++++++++++++++++
Broke, the documentary that brings ESPN’s outstanding “30 For 30” back tonight, begins with this pair of statistics, courtesy of Sports Illustrated: “By the time they have been retired for two years, 78 percent of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress; within five years of retirement, an estimated 60 percent of former NBA players are broke.”
The mission of Broke, directed by Billy Corben, is to explore the factors — and there are a bunch — that lead to professional athletes, widely known for their very high salaries, to have such a dismal record when it comes to post-career financial security. Nothing more than a collection of talking-head interviews with former players and a few other experts in finance and sports, the film starts with the obvious.
The root of the problem, most of the speakers seem to agree, is that players most often turn pro by their very early twenties, right out of college if not before that. They generally have no business experience. Unlike people who inherit their wealth or make it in business, they don’t necessarily have natural connections to people who are used to handling a lot of money. When you hand a 22-year-old a few hundred thousand dollars, it’s most likely going to be spent. That is not an age in which you typically find excellent long-range planning skills, after all. (Former NBA player Jamal Mashburn talks about an endorsement deal with Fila that netted him a Ferrari as a signing bonus when, he says, he couldn’t even drive stick.)
And then there’s the extravagant spending. Cars, houses, jewelry, tailored suits … the culture of active professional athletes, at least in the NFL and the NBA, is one that encourages excess, and because it attracts such competitive and driven people, some describe becoming competitively profligate, which is sort of a disaster, as you can imagine. Remembering a fox coat he bought and wore only a couple of times, NFL linebacker Bart Scott speaks not with mild regret but with … well, this: “It almost makes me look like a silverback.”
But where the film gets more interesting is where it moves from these issues to the ones that don’t necessarily come to mind first when you think about why people who have been incredibly well paid wind up broke. They don’t just spend money buying diamonds and cars (although they buy a lot of diamonds and cars). They gamble. They keep having to start over in new cities if they’re traded. They pay high tax rates, and then they pay agents and lawyers. They don’t remember to budget for the off-season, especially in the NFL, which pays them week to week — anyone who didn’t already know that probably learned it during the NFL lockout, when players who are thought of as extravagantly compensated sought loans to tide them over.
There are all kinds of bad decisions that go beyond extravagant purchases. They agree to invest in businesses, from restaurants to record labels to car washes. (Retired wide receiver Andre Rison is one of the film’s most entertaining contributors, and really knows how to bring a dry, perplexed kind of delivery to a line like, “For some reason, professional athletes got this fad with buying … car washes.”) They’re subjected to straight-up theft and they’re hit up by friends and family. As Herm Edwards, a former player and coach who now does presentations for players, puts it, “It’s hard to tell people that you love ‘no.'” Longtime Cleveland Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar, who declared bankruptcy in 2009, estimates that he was at one time or another supporting somewhere between 25 and 50 families.
But if you really want to lose a lot of money, the fastest way might be to take the route of someone like Evander Holyfield, who is said in the film to have eleven children by nine women. You know what’s probably more expensive than a failed car wash? Eleven kids, forever. Child support recurs over and over again in Broke, which gives an airing both to the athletes’ complaints that women seek them out specifically to get pregnant and get rich and to the response that you can’t very well throw your athlete status around to impress women in clubs and then claim they trapped you because of your athlete status. (I do wish they’d at least touched on the matter of birth control and whether that might be a logical way to avoid winding up supporting children you never intended to have. Because if not using birth control is part of athlete culture, that’s noteworthy.)
One other thing. Don’t forget: in order to go bankrupt, you don’t have to lose all the money you made in a lifetime of being paid as a professional athlete. You only have to lose whatever you made in your career. An average NFL career is between three and four seasons. You may wind up with injuries that need long-term care, or that inhibit your ability to work in other jobs. The film becomes, in part, a picture of how hard it is to place your current fortunes in the context of what will become your later fortunes. What 21-year-old is good at thinking, “I’m really going to need this money in 20 years if I blow out my knee”?
What’s impressive about Broke is that what starts out as a pretty simple-sounding question — Why do guys who live extravagantly wind up running out of money? — turns out to be a pretty complex one. Yes, they lose their money by spending it foolishly, and nobody is shying away from that. But they don’t lose it only by spending it foolishly. They lose it by being young, by loving their families, by mistaking a bad investment (like a restaurant) for a safe, mature thing to do in preparation for what comes after sports.
Broke is ultimately a little too unstructured for me; I became weary after a while from listening to the thumping music under the interview clips. I’d absolutely have cooled it with the music at some point, because it does become distracting. But the information here, and the straightforwardness with which a lot of these guys offer it, is fascinating. The “30 For 30” series has been great at explaining the culture of sports to both fans and non-fans, very much including the business side. (The first one I ever saw was the fine King’s Ransom, about the trade of Wayne Gretzky to the L.A. Kings. Like other “30 For 30” films, it’s streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime.) Broke looks at the players’ side of all that money and concludes that it’s surprisingly easy to lose it, no matter how much you have. If Mike Tyson can declare bankruptcy, after all, who couldn’t?
==============
The Onlooker
m6bhoy
11:22 on 8 October, 2014
You’re right. Gerry Creaney should have been playing for Albion Rovers but instead Celtic hoovered him and in the process runied the Coatbridge Muiryhall Street North Junior League. How far from G40 should Celtic be allowed to recruit from?
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Ok then we’ll have a team of young wannabees from the other side of the globe and loanee foreign misfits and mercenaries form other club then. Personally, I get more a buzz watching and supporting a team that has a strong local connection even if they do hail from Coatbridge. Most of my childhood was spent in Castlemilk and I look forward to seeing young Calvin Miller make his hoops debut more than some kid from China or some other distant part of the globe. He went to my old primary school which only heightens my interest. Yes I understand the need for foreign heroes as well but I think when we field a team and it doesn’t include a single home based player then something’s not quite right with the balance
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Well now you’re just exaggerating. If Maradona and various others thought Du Wei was a class act then why should Celtic not try to sign him? We would be the only club in the world that signed players on the basis of where they came from rather than how good they were. We do also sign local players and run an academy but the view seems to be that those produced locally are not all of sufficient standard. I hope Calvin Miller becomes a superstar. But we need to cast our net far and wide too surely?
Sounds like I’m still thinking of that fish supper…
Livibhoy
you would hope this is part of the set up at Lennoxtown and st ninians, going by someones comments on here after Sunday(sorry can’t remember who posted). Youth players not interested eating crap, pre madonnas before they have achieved anything in football never mind life.
Im sure barcabhoy could speak to them about the perils of being unfullfilled in life , or just point them in the direction of posters on here who are useless and unable to deal with change..
Who wants healthy chips? Plenty vinager …..on the Ronny subject can’t help poss 3 hail Mary,s
Fish and Chips .
Flying to London tomorrow . A few things to do.
The entertainment will include a goat ,rice and peas curry and a fabulously good cod and chips from ——–Golden Union Fish Bar in Poland Street W1. Highly recommended.
THE ONLOOKER
Firing blanks might not do you any favours on the pitch but it will save you a fortune off it…
coolmore mafia
11:11 on 8 October, 2014
Jimmy Johnstone, Jock Stein all gave interviews/did adverts for the daily record /Sunday mail – should they gtf also?
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No doubt Jimmy or Jock being the gents and men they were, refrained from using terms like laughing stock. No doubt, the DR or Mail didn’t call them thugs and thieves on their front page then have them over for interviews.
The Onlooker
“What profiteth a man if he gains the whole world but lose his own soul” Mathew 8:36
………………………………..
I went back to 8:36 but coodny find his post!!
whitedoghunch
11:25 on 8 October, 2014
sous vide chips would be the healthiest
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Aye but fat ones or thin ones? :-)
PHILBHOY
Sacrilege!
And very funny too.
blantyretim is praying for the Knox family
In all honesty the Youth players will benefit other clubs 95% of the time. There must be about 50 players from our youth system at other clubs in Britain and further afield. I think some of our first team players need this type of exposure too.
Just because you finish your apprenticeship it doesn;t mean you don;t stop learning. I think that mentally and physically our players need to be tuned up. If Ronny wants to change the thinking he needs to challenge the players mentally as well.
Maybe Celtic already do things like this I don;t know.
I do remember reading that when Jock Stein came back to Celtic he removed the snooker tables at Celtic Park or maybe Barrowfield and put in table tennis tables. He didn;t want the players lying on snooker tables during their off time. Table tennis improves reflexes and decision making. It works the brain. I noticed that during the Ryder Cup the European team during their down time played table tennis. These are the small things that can just ramp it up a notch. Better than sitting about playing cards or reading tablets/Ipads.
It’s competitive too which is no bad thing. I am not a pro athlete but if I play anyone at any game I want to win. Our players should be the same.
LB
South of Tunis……………was in London last week and to hear an English accent was a rarity. Do any English born people actually live there? Saw a great show there The Jersey Boys try and see it, brilliant.
Philhoy 11:34
Brilliant !
Philbhoy
11:34 on 8 October, 2014
The Onlooker
“What profiteth a man if he gains the whole world but lose his own soul” Mathew 8:36
………………………………..
I went back to 8:36 but coodny find his post!!
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:-))