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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“Let’s talk about independence again – anything but this rubbish.”….naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If anyone does want to read a football book make it the secret footballer! Hahahahaha
1st time I have said that this week!
LB
RWE 15:53
Well said,3 pages of how to sell a book,not interested
media hype on his part and manipulation by the brethern
who buy into the same club same farcical fantasy nonsense.
These idiots get their kudos by the wind up
it amazes me some are so gullible and interested in their opinion.
hope your well mhate
HH
dena29
Womb to the tomb
stealing that :-))
rattle bags over the south coast ,now where is my thunder buddy …
HH
There is a lot of uncertainty about the club at the moment
The loan players
in
Decanyer
Guidetti
Wakaso
Berget
Tonev
possible move
Virgil van Dyke
Craig Nelson(if he keep playin the way he is)
Leigh Griffiths
contract negotiations
Kris
Brooni
Injured
Mikel
Adam mathews
Charlie mulgrew
Jamesie
and there is going to be an uncertain summer if we dont click into gear soon
HH
An Tearmann
On the flip side maybe a clear out is not a bad thing.
LB
All this talk of Roy Keane is well, just talk.
Look at the facts please.
Keane was a brilliant footballer, fact.
As a manager, again the facts speak volumes – -he was useless.
So, why do people on here keep on about him being manager of the greatest club in world football as that would be a retrograde step for sure.
Lets suffer RD in the meantime and give the guy a chance to mould these wee delicate souls into a FIT football team.
Personally I doubt he willl do it but give the guy more time please.
We know we have plenty out there who would just love us to fail without us going on and on about him here
KINGLuBO
You could have split them up thus –
Injured
Charlie Mulgrew
Always Injured
Mikel
Matthews
Jamesie
BT
Sorry to hear that. Any longer and you will be due Council Tax to West Dunbartonshire Council.
Kitalba,
Let’s leave it.
In your post you gave a list of incidents that had happened to Neil Lennon.
You do not know what knowledge Roy Keane had of them or what Roy Keane thought of them, although you do make a fairly educated and I would say accurate guess.
You also asked 2 questions;
“What sort of wage would one accept to justify subjecting his family to that choreographed and concentrated vile hatred? What conditions and guarantees would have to be in place before a thinking man would expose his family, and self, to such hostilities?”
And in the same paragraph, you posted “None of us will probably ever know.”
Presumably in reply to your own 2 questions.
To me, if you can’t prove Roy Keane’s opinion, then it’s conjecture. And that may also be the very same reason why you cant give a reason as to why Roy Keane never said it at the time.
I am willing to leave it here as it’s not really adding to the blog and Starry Plough has obviously moved on. And he was the one who asked you why Roy Keane never gave those reasons at the time.
I am finding it difficult to get worked up about Roy Keane’s “revelations”.
I thought it was already an established fact that Ronny Deila was first approached as an asst. manager with a view to a longer term promotion but he was promoted earlier due to Neil leaving. It was a version of the “Boot Room” approach used by Liverpool with some success. When Neil decided to go, It seems our majority shareholder thought Roy Keane could fulfill the mentor role envisaged for NFL instead. So far, so mundane.
It only becomes controversial for 3 reasons:-
1) Because you think Roy Keane should not be let near our club
2) Because the majority shareholder should have a more unified approach with the CEO and Board, or
3) Because RD was promoted ahead of time.
On the first point, I think Roy Keane is in danger of becoming a caricature as a man and as a manager. He is seen as a traitor because of Saipan and as a beast because of the Haaland tackle. If that was all RK was then he would not have got this far and he would not still be involved at 2 levels (ROI and Villa) to good effect. Roy has values and abilities which counteract his bad side. He has matured since Saipan and, though he finds it hard to say sorry, there are indications he would like things to have worked out differently. The people he betrayed (the ROI international set up) have welcomed him back into the fold so it is not up to Celtic to be uber-Gaelic about this because Roy Keane has no Saipan history with our club.
I would not condone the Haaland tackle for a moment and I wish that Roy had some other thoughts about how to deal with sporting rivalry, other than to inflict a career ending injury on a player. However, he is not the only professional football player to have taken their revenge early and brutally. We have revered figures within our club who fairly regularly dished out retribution often before “tribution” was taken into account. In any case, he was coming as a manager, so a repeat of the leg breaking incident was an unlikely risk to factor in to our considerations.
Roy has managed at Sunderland and Ipswich. He is currently accepted and even head hunted by MON with Ireland and Paul Lambert at Villa. They do not consider him a “beast” unable to be trusted around young footballers or too hot headed or disloyal to be an assistant. And, tellingly, Roy Keane is not too up himself to settle for an assistant’s role. I think MON and Paul Lambert are shrewd judges of character. They will have bought into Roy Keane, warts and all, because they see advantages that outweigh the risks. It is all very well for posters here to take an alternative view of the balance of risks but, please spare me from believing that you are outlining a proven case with no room for dissension.
2) How much disunity was there or has there been between DD, PL and other Board members. Truth is, very few of us no but it won’t stop us speculating. We accept that DD offered his backing and was in favour of him landing the job. Maybe it was his whim, maybe he wanted to shake things up at CP, or maybe, just maybe, he genuinely thought Roy was right and ripe for the job. After all, he had an acknowledged role in approaching MON and WGS so he does not have a bad track record in appointing managers.
The only other known factor is that Roy declined DD’s offer. Whatever Roy says in print or whatever rumours are out there about Boardroom rebellions, very few of us, myself included, know why it did not come to pass. Was PL obstructionist or was RK reluctant? Was DD inclined to back down to PL or was he pre-empted by RK declining the offer? Unless you are somewhere in that circle of decision making you will not have a reliable overview from which to answer those questions.
What we do know is that the declined offer was never an “official” offer so there is the usual get out of plausible deniability. But we also know that there was no blood letting or casualties in this disagreement. No one within the Board has suffered (yet) for opposing DD or “persuading” him to think again, if that is what happened. DD has given no indication that he was disappointed with or did not understand the opposition from within CP nor has he expressed frustration about being “dicked around” by Roy Keane. He has accepted it as one of those things that happen with appointments; the guy you want may not want you or your co-partners may disagree with your choice. These things happen and they will continue to happen. They do not indicate a dram far less a crisis.
Mind you, if the RD era continues to struggle badly, we may see some suffer for their opposition to RK yet. That remains a possibility but I think DD will just see it as something he fancied but could not make happen and will be moving on to planning next steps rather than brooding over past disagreements.
On the final problem, RD being made Manager rather than assistant, you have to ask what is the alternative. Who else had the credentials to be promoted to the front line post and could also mentor RD? Owen Coyle? Mark McGhee? David Hay? All of them have flaws as candidates. Owen has already said No once (as has RK now) and that would have seen him given less time by the fans. Mark is seen as a failed manager with similar stock to a John Hughes/ John Collins type of managerial career. David Hay is a long time out of the front line and may indeed be a different type of manager than RD would be so continuity would not be achieved.
In the end, faffing about had to stop, with a season to be faced, and the inevitable had to be faced. If we were going to offer RD the job next year, why not now? Maybe he would even get more time and patience if we stated this upfront. Who knows?
I am not arguing that the Board got it right with the RD appointment. It would be hard to marshall a lot of evidence in support of that view. What I am saying is that they had “events” to deal with, “events” which were not fully under their control but to which there had to be a reaction and decisions made. They made the best of the circumstances they found themselves in by bringing forward a long term plan. Whose to say that RD would be any more or less of a success if he had a year in the understudy role? How committed and involved would RK be if he felt he was in a caretaker role, only keeping the seat warm?
Though Roy Keane has made a statement about “not being loved enough”, I still have no great handle on whether he means he would have to have been wanted as a long term option or whether he wanted a more monetary evaluation of how loved he was. DD probably thought it would have been of mutual benefit to both sides but he never got to see if that was a fair judgement.
In the final analyses, it is all moot and just yesterday’s news, or it soon will be.
Our issues are whether RD can stamp a recognisable shape on a bit of a mess of a team. We will not get our next look at the evidence for this until the 18th of this month.
So, in the absence of any real important football to talk about, maybe RK’s comments do serve a purpose. It gives us a wee bit of kitchen sink drama to get involved with and some cryptic messages to decipher. Like a Sudoko puzzle, it might exercise the brain for a moment but I doubt it will make me wiser.
ahemmm..
thunder buddy stand down..
sun splitting the heavens now…
Bright blue skies over Pollokshaws West. “The next stop is Thornlibank” ;-)
Livibhoy
I agree mhate as long as its planned and replacements sought out.I just feel with the use of loan players becoming more popular every summer is going to be a state of flux(seeing if we can get loan players of EPL clubs)
Philbhoy
take your point bout some players being injured,the way i would look on it is how can we improve our sports science side to limit these injuries.There is also a pressure on those always injured-mikel,matthews and Jamesie to rush them back early from rest as they are important to us(if fit i would have them in)
HH to you both :-)
Dharma Bam:
I’m more than happy to leave it, no big deal to me, just like all the other posts full of conjecture and fallacy since my post to which you so keenly reference. The only difference between mine and them is mine was supportive of Roy Keane whilst the bulk of the others were diametrical.
People see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe CSC.
Correction to last post:-
“They do not indicate a dram far less a crisis.”
That should read drama.
You can still have a dram if you wish.
Turkeybhoy
It seems to me that there is a bit of a concerted effort going on by the media to undermine RD.
It sells papers and they cngaf of its effect on Celtic.
It also seems incongruent to me that when supporters are looking for signs of consistency and so stability, that something as destabilising as changing the manager is being proposed.
A bit like the Captain of the Titanic looking for another iceberg to ram into to stabilise the ship.
If the strategy is that Celtic move to a continental football model of fitness and technique and that move is by its nature destabilising, then if ever there was a time to do so it is now when dropping points does not mean being left 15 behind to one strong opponent, as opposed to 6 (with a game in hand) to a group of improving opponents.
Football and strategy are strange bedfellows, which explains why our game lurches from one seeming crisis to another with short termism the order of the day.
SFTB:
I thought that Keane’s tackle did not end Haaland’s career. Didn’t he play on for a few years? Might be wrong about that.
Jobo Baldie
16:28 on
7 October, 2014
Bright blue skies over Pollokshaws West. “The next stop is Thornliebank”
so named in legend
Mary queen of Scots retreating from the battle of Langside had to find a ‘quiet bit of the field’ to well…you know
on sitting down to…well…you know, by a riverside
there was a sudden yelp
she sprang up and said ‘my goodness this is a thornybank!
:-)
HH
LocalfolkloreCsc
Paul 67 well done you once again move the goalposts away from the real issue . DEILA is a dud your puppet master will be proud .
It is a law of Celtic fans that the more points we drop, the greater the probability of Davie Hay being mentioned as saviour.
DD
smi already applied for…
David Hay is 66. He will be 67 in January, I think.
Too auld?
G_J
no the closer to the book being released I’d imagine…….8))
kitalba
I just double checked and you are right. Haland finished the match in which the tackle occurred and played a midweek International friendly afterwards. He had an operation in the summer and made 4 sub appearances the following season before retiring through the effects of injury.
As usual, the truth is more complex. It seems Haaland had a pre-existing injury which was affected for the worse by Roy’s vicious tackle. I don”t want to paint it as the worst tackle of all time. I wouldn’t be a good candidate for judging such a competition but I will stand by the view that Roy Keane is not a caricature of a man. He has positive qualities.
I did not want him here as a player but I would have welcomed him being given a chance as a manager, given the calibre of candidate we are usually able to attract. Where I might differ is in the belief that, if RK came, Celtic’s purse strings would have been loosened to any dramatic effect. I think we are stuck, by economic circumstances, with the current strategy.
If we win our game in hand we will be third in the league.
EL – still in it
LC – still in it
SC -still in it
Injured players coming back soon, new players bedding in.
Plus when Ronny realises what foot the players actually kick with, we should be OK.
Philbhoy
Good post mate. Simple facts sometimes stop us over thinking.
League cup is huge for Ronny. Win Jansen knew it would ease the pressure on him and the players and got the cup in the cabinet early. It was one of the trophies that Myth always seemed to win. Takes the pressure off the team each season.
Hopefully Celtic can start winning this trophy because bar the 7-1 game the competition has never been a smooth one for us.
LB
Philbhoy
16:21 on
7 October, 2014
You could have split them up thus –
Injured
Charlie Mulgrew
Always Injured
Mikel
Matthews
Jamesie
You could add another category,
Better off injured:
Boerrigter
Toooooooo early for music?
Guess it depends on how much beer you have had eh?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWBKBkEJQRk
From the cradle to the grave……
All i want……is you xxx
so we as a club didnt try hard enough to get roy
and we got completely unknown ronnie deila instead
that has worked out well for us
jeezassss our board and chief executive is some shambles
Who’s craig nelson
setting free the bears for Res. 12 & Oscar Knox but saying no to CQN racists
I think Haaland retired with injury to his left leg. Keane did him in his right.
Looking for a wee bit of help…
Young Hoops Event on Sunday so I’m taking the wee boy but not sure where Barrowfield is, I think it’s on London Road but it’s a long road! Not sure of parking etc. either.
Thanks in advance and Hail!Hail!
joe_joe_john_bobby_teddy
Craig Nelson
Football player
Craig Nelson is a Scottish professional football goalkeeper who currently plays for Brechin City in Scottish League One. Nelson began his career with Partick Thistle before moving to Ireland to join Cork City in January 1991. Wikipedia
Born: May 28, 1971 (age 43), Coatbridge
Height: 1.85 m
Position: Goalkeeper
This one?
When Roy Keane was Manager of Sunderland he paid over a million pounds for Stokes. That’s all I need to know about his managerial ability.
Lets give Ronnie more time.
Maestro
just behind Celtic club passed graveyard and whisky bond….
Cheers blantyretim, know where it is now.
Coming from the east maestro …before Celtic park..