Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Celtic need to make sure this crisis becomes an opportunity

Right, the Neil Lennon era is finally over. The lame duck of the last several months has quacked its last. It would seem a bit cruel for someone to recount how it came to this, to rub salt into the wound...

So now the question is: where do Celtic go from here?


They are a distant second to Rangers, eighteen points adrift. They have no manager, no Director of Football and the new Chief Executive does not start until the summer. They have several key players likely to leave at the end of the season, and so much deadwood in the squad that you could build an ark out of it (the mediocre left-backs went in two-by-two, hurrah, hurrah...). Whilst they will be in the Champions League qualifiers, the path to the group stage potentially includes matches against French, Portuguese or Russian opponents. And don't forget Covid and its effect on finances; the club lost £6m between June and December alone.


But as Einstein once said, "in the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity". Can Celtic turn this into a moment where they reinvent themselves and drag themselves back towards not only the domestic title but also European success? Basically, is this going to be a John Barnes/Kenny Dalglish disaster, or a Martin O'Neill miracle?


Here's what needs to be done. It's a hell of a job. In short (much to the chagrin of the supporters), they need to copy what their greatest rivals have done in the last year or two...


THE NEW MANAGER

I prepare to be proved wrong - I never expected Brendan Rodgers to come to Scotland - but it could be very difficult for the club to attract a name with high pedigree. One issue is that Brexit means that managers from outside the UK will need work permits, which could prove quite tricky and prevent the club snaring the 21st century equivalent of Wim Jansen. Of foreign coaches mentioned in dispatches, Rafa Benitez is surely unrealistic, whilst Roberto Martinez's exploits with Belgium would surely leave him fancying he could do better. Eddie Howe makes more sense but there may be jobs closer to home (Crystal Palace? Newcastle?) that could come up in the near future. In contrast, Steve Clarke may see this as a step up but he surely wouldn't leave Scotland until they were knocked out of the Euros and would therefore only have a few weeks in the job before the new season.


In short, this search could be long and laborious. One hopes that the club, already having realized Lennon was a busted flush, have already started it.


RECRUITMENT

It's plain for all to see that standards have dropped dramatically since Lennon replaced Brendan Rodgers. There have been unkind (and probably accurate) suggestions that signing policy was being run as much by Peter Lawwell as by the coaching staff. Regardless, Celtic do not have a philosophy in place for how the first team is going to play and how to build the squad around that. Lennon did insist last summer on moving to a 3-5-2 and recruiting with a view to that, but those tactics made little sense given the players he had available - shoehorning James Forrest into a wing-back role and leaving little room for Mo Elyounoussi, Tom Rogic and Ryan Christie - and the quality of opposition; three centre-backs and a defensive midfielder against Hamilton Accies?


Meanwhile the youth academy continues to offer only crumbs. Mikey Johnston is perenially injured, while the jury is out on whether Stephen Welsh can be the next Stephen McManus or the next Stephen Crainey. Kids who were hyped up a few years ago such as Karamoko Dembele, Armstrong Oko-flex and Cameron Harper are set to leave having failed to make the grade, with poor development and a lack of a realistic pathway to the first team among the reasons for this.


Celtic seem to have been in the market for a Director Of Football for sometime now, and finding one who will mesh well with the new manager/head coach is critical. Perhaps the best strategy would be to appoint the DoF first? Bouncing around from one strategy to another is not an efficient or cost-effective strategy in modern football and doing so (Lennon to Deila to Rodgers to Lennon) is one of the reasons they have ended up in this mess. Celtic can aspire to get back in the Champions League in the next year or two, but the process of turning them into a club that can get there on a regular basis again will take much, much longer.


THE SQUAD

It's probably best to look at this by position group, but damn it's going to be a big job for the new boss to sort this out.


GOALKEEPER
This mainly depends on whether Vasilis Barkas is salvageable. It's safe to say that for £4.5m Celtic expected a rather safer pair of hands. Scott Bain is an acceptable backup but nothing more, whilst Conor Hazard went from cup final starter to persona non grata in the space of a few weeks; it's not even clear whether he has signed a new contract or not. Barkas wouldn't be the first goalie who has a difficult first season and makes a huge leap in his second, but if not then Celtic will be back in the goalie market again.


DEFENCE

Kristoffer Ajer will probably leave as he only has one year left on his contract; his stagnation under Lennon may well cost the club several million pounds. Shane Duffy and Diego Laxalt have been loan duds; Jonjoe Kenny is a far better player but convincing the right-back to make his move from Everton permanent may not be easy. Anthony Ralston is under contract for another year but clearly has no future here. And neither do Boli Bolingoli, Jack Hendry or Lee O'Connor, who are all out on loan currently.


So that leaves Christopher Jullien, Greg Taylor and Stephen Welsh. And Jullien may not even be fit for the start of next season. Eek. I suppose you could also count Nir Bitton as a defender, though as far as I can see Lennon was the only person who did.


MIDFIELD

Scott Brown will be thirty-six in June and it's clearly time to put him out to pasture/melt him down for glue (delete as applicable depending on how you feel about him). Tom Rogic is likely to take up an offer from an Asian club, and it's hard to see Mo Elyounoussi returning for a third season on loan or Olivier Ntcham coming back from his temporary move to Marseille. The good news is that Ismaila Soro, Callum McGregor and David Turnbull can probably provide a pretty balanced central midfield, but there's a real need for depth here. Scott Robertson is that rarest of things - an Academy product who the club have high hopes for. A new manager might light a fire under youngster Ewan Henderson too?


ATTACK

I think its safe to assume Odsonne Edouard will be offski with only a year to go on his current deal, and the smart money is on Ryan Christie looking for a new challenge as well. Celtic will not be short of numbers up front, but they might be short on quality. There's Albian Ajeti, who has scored a few goals but who really should have made more of an impact given his £5m transfer fee; Patryk Klimala, a £3.5m dud; the erratic Leigh Griffiths; and the forgotten Vakoun Bayo. Out wide there's another failure in Marian Shved (whose arrival actually predates Lennon), plus Mikey 'Mr Glass' Johnston and James Forrest, who is close to a return from a long injury layoff.


There will presumably be cash to spend, especially if there are outgoings; Edouard in particular should fetch a huge fee. But whoever takes this job has a heck of a job on their hands. And unlike Brendan Rodgers a few years ago, he has a proper opponent on the other side of Glasgow who could make life very, very difficult for them.


Celtic simply cannot afford to get this wrong.



Lawrie Spence has whinged about Scottish football on Narey's Toepoker since September 2007. He has a life outside this blog. Honestly.

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Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Aberdeen have gone stale under McInnes

Back in the olden days, when everything was in black and white - or maybe it just felt like that in Aberdeen at the start of the 2000s - I was a regular visitor at Pittodrie. One season under Ebbe Skovdahl the Dons finished fourth in the league; later on under Jimmy Calderwood they came fourth three times and third once. Other league finishes in the early years of the twenty-first century include eighth, eleventh, ninth, ninth, ninth, eighth. And of course there was Skovdahl's first campaign, where they were spared relegation only because Falkirk's ground was at risk of falling down at any moment.


Leon Mike, Laurent D'Jaffo, Leigh Hinds, David Zdrilic, Lubomir Blaha, Dyron Daal, David Bus, Jerel Ifill...doubtless Aberdeen fans will remember plenty more duffers from that era, but these were names that jogged this particular memory, and not in a nice way. It does no harm to remember that things could, and have been, a heck of a lot worse.


However, that does not necessarily mean that Derek McInnes should get a free pass.


Times have changed during the seven years that Deek has managed the Dons. Expectations are higher, and should be. Part of that is down to his own success - four consecutive second places (which would have been five but for a missed foul on the keeper in the final match of the 2013-14 season) - but also investment in the club is rather higher than it was in the dog days of Skovdahl, Steve Paterson and even Craig Brown. The club have the third highest wage bill in Scotland, and by that measure alone coming fourth in each of the last two seasons behind Steve Clarke's Kilmarnock and Stephen Robinson's Motherwell respectively is an underachievement. And there has been just one trophy, a League Cup.


There is a school of thought that after a few years under the same manager football clubs often become stale, and that is the perfect adjective for how things feel in the North-East. Arguably the peak was the 2016-17 season where they reached both cup finals and went toe-to-toe with Celtic's invincibles in the Scottish Cup Final. Four years later, six of the fourteen who played that day are still at the club, but only keeper Joe Lewis (who has not had a great season by his standards) is really anywhere near that level any more. Shay Logan is rarely trusted now, Andrew Considine's Scotland cap feelgood story shouldn't distract from the fact that he is past his best, and Jonny Hayes, Ash Taylor and Niall McGinn - each of whom left and then came back - appear to be very much on the decline. 


Rebuilding the team has not gone to plan. In three and a half years, one could argue the only unequivocally successful signings have been Gary Mackay-Steven (now long gone), Lewis Ferguson, Ross McCrorie and Sam Cosgrove (sold for good money last week). The list of duds is rather longer: Michael Devlin and Ronald Hernandez in defence, Greg Tansey, Chris Forrester, Stephen Gleeson, Craig Bryson, Funso Ojo and Dylan McGeouch in midfield as McInnes used up significant resources trying to replicate the Jack-Shinnie-McLean trio in the centre of the park; Curtis Main and James Wilson up front.


Worse, the club's youth system has not exactly come up trumps, with the exception of Scott McKenna. Scott Wright only shone in fits and bursts, while we're still waiting for Connor McLennan to put it all together and beginning to wonder if Bruce Anderson ever will.


It's not just personnel that are the problem. Aberdeen's philosophy has not evolved at all since McInnes first arrived. This is especially noticeable when they are out of possession, with a focus on man-to-man marking all over the pitch and immediate pressing of the ball when it is lost. This previously worked well when the overall quality of the team was higher and when they played so much of the game in the opposition half, but now most opponents have them worked out. Teams who are good enough in possession to beat that initial press find space between the lines, and players who are clever enough to switch position (especially coming off the wing) can easily cause havoc with the shape of the team.


In attack there continues to be a focus on getting it wide and sticking it in the box, which is simply not the most effective way of scoring goals in the modern game. Neither the wide players nor the forwards have been consistently dangerous for months now; Cosgrove had scored only twice from open play in twenty-seven matches before his departure, while Main is a player who can only be effective in nineteen-eighties hoofball. To make matters worse the one impressive forward, Marley Watkins, got injured during his loan spell and returned south. Their leading assist providers, Hayes and Ryan Hedges, are averaging one assist every eight league games. Hedges is now out for the season.


The deadline day wheeler-dealing in strikers felt very un-McInnes, a throw of the dice from a manager who generally seems risk-averse. Given everything else, such unorthodoxy is probably not a bad thing. The odds of one or more of Fraser Hornby, Callum Hendry and Florian Kamberi proving their worth are probably decent, but it feels like an act of desperation than a cunning plan. If it turns out as a double six, revitalizes the place and drags the Dons back into third place with some momentum, then maybe, just maybe, there is still a future at Aberdeen for the current boss. But it does feel like too little to late, like change is inevitable.


Lawrie Spence has whinged about Scottish football on Narey's Toepoker since September 2007. He has a life outside this blog. Honestly.

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