Winning At Any Cost

Obviously that’s not always the case. In his time as Celtic manager, Tommy Burns had the team playing some of the best football Celtic have played. Sadly all he had to show for it was a Scottish Cup. Some have argued that Tony Mowbray tried to go down a similar path. Indeed, it was often heard that his football was something like that of Tommy Burns and just as effective at winning trophies. If you ask me, had Tony Mowbray had the likes of Pierre Van Hooijdonk, Jorge Cadette, Paulo Di Canio and Andreas Thom at his disposal then maybe we wouldn’t all be sitting around wishing the World Cup would hurry up and start so we had something to distract us for a while. Or perhaps we would – it’s not as if the team were exactly firing on all cylinders even when there was a bit of quality in it.

“We did it by playing football. Pure, beautiful, inventive football.” – Jock Stein, 1967

If ever there was proof that playing good football can be the route to success, Jock Stein was that proof. Lisbon is still our greatest ever triumph, and you see in that one game how the beautiful game can triumph over the negativity that sometimes invades it. Jock Stein set the standard by which every Celtic manager since has been measured. But was it beautiful all the time? Of course not. Stein knew that there were games where you had to dig in and grind out results. A cold wet February in the mud kicking up the hill at Easter Road?

That’s what the likes of John Hughes was for. Knowing how to mix the beautiful with the necessary was precisely why Stein won nine in a row and so many other trophies with it. He had to do it, it’s not as if there wasn’t competition back then like some other nine in a rows we won’t talk about. Martin O’Neill’s Celtic is another cracking example of how you can mix the two. His first season in charge brought us our first treble in a generation. How did we win that treble? He solidified the defence by making them big and tough and hard to break down. Meanwhile, he had two sitting midfielders most of the time in front of them. That’s quite negative on paper. But with only three at the back, both wingers consistently bombing forward, the third central midfielder always hanging around the edge of the box looking for a goal, and two decent strikers who liked to be in the box, O’Neill found the balance between doing what was necessary and playing entertaining football.

It wasn’t just the treble season either. Some of the football played on the road to Seville was fantastic to watch. The beating of Barca was a backs to the wall – get the job done – kind of game. O’Neill knew exactly when to play the beautiful football and when to just dig in and do what was necessary.

Mind you, O’Neill also serves as a warning to others. You can’t just continually grind out results all the time, because eventually you’ll come unstuck. In the end, it will be your undoing. Whether or not O’Neill took his eye of the ball in the final season with family matters rightly foremost in his mind, we suffered poor performance after poor performance. In fact, that season was so bad that O’Neill to this day is suffering from people accusing him of playing long ball tactics. That all came about in his final season at Celtic. Prior to that the only things you heard mentioned about O’Neill’s tactics were how they would soon be seen in England again as he was linked with every job under the sun down there.

Funny, you never hear Walter Nosurname linked with anyone. That’s despite the fact he doesn’t even have a contract. Remember when O’Neill signed the one year rolling contract and all the press that generated?!

O’Neill’s final season was a disappointing one both in the success and the entertainment categories. Sure, we won the Scottish Cup by in that season it was bittersweet. Gordon Strachan managed to pick us up again and even had us entertained for a while. The home game against Benfica where we won 3-0 was very probably Strachan’s finest hour. Not only did we get a brilliant result against a very decent team, but we were entertained too. It will rightly go down as one of the all time great European nights.

But of course, Strachan’s team went into decline. The Rangers fans point to Walter Nosurname returning as the turning point. They’re almost right too – at least about the timing. Celtic under Strachan lost something after going out at the last sixteen stage in extra time to AC Milan – which just so happens to be around the same time Rangers last changed manager. It was nothing they did though. Celtic spent the rest of that season coasting to the second successive title. Sure, they didn’t need to play, but there was something about them that just didn’t seem right. Even the press started to get excited that Celtic were stumbling. But it was never more to me than when they turned up at Ibrox for the final game against them that season and didn’t even try. Yes, the league title had already been wrapped up by then, but this was THEM. I don’t know about other Celtic fans, but not trying against Rangers at Ibrox is almost unforgivable in my eyes. Coincidentally, the game we don’t try is the only time “the mighty Boydchenko” has scored against us. Funny that…

We’ve been struggling to find whatever we lost in Milan ever since. The performances have never really returned. We pipped Rangers to the title for three in a row when arguably they were otherwise distracted in a season where the only thing of note was that final month. Celtic, considered down and out by even some of the Celtic support who wanted managerial change, pulled it together long enough to get over the line. But after that they continued to meander in Strachan’s final season. Dire game after dire game, until finally Rangers kept it together long enough to win the title.

It seems fairly clear to me that the trick is to find the balance. The chance to play beautiful football and win all the time rarely comes about. Stein proved it back in the 60s and 70s and it’s just as true today as it was then. O’Neill proved as much in his time at Celtic. Even Barcelona with their historic six trophies last year had to dig in at some point and just grind out a result. It’s something they’ve failed to do again this season and it’s cost them two trophies already and may yet cost them a third.

Which brings me nicely to the other side of the coin. How far do you go to win? Yes, you have to strike that balance between playing beautiful football and grinding out the results when it matters, but do you do whatever it takes to get those results?

Take our old adversary, Jose Mourinho. This is a man who can get the best out of his players. But he’s also a man who can get the worst out of them, and I don’t mean their ability. He’s been like that for as long as I can remember. I remember flicking over to Eurosport after Henrik had sent us into the UEFA Cup final in 2003. Porto were playing Lazio in the other semi and I wanted to see how they were getting on. Not that it really mattered, because I’d seen highlights of the first leg where Porto had smashed them 4-1. They looked a damn good side. I was kinda hoping Lazio might have pulled off an unlikely comeback, but of course they hadn’t. Roll forwarda month. I say roll… it’s pretty apt for what we got in Seville. I don’t need to go into it, but lets just say as the years have gone on I’ve taken how Porto played against us to be a compliment.

You see, I’ve watched Mourinho’s teams – Porto, Chelsea and Inter Milan – and I’ve seen all three of them play brilliant football… right up until they come up against a good team. If the team they’re playing is better than they are, the dirty tricks come out. The better the team, the more dirty the tricks get. Anyone who watched Inter Milan at the Camp Nou this week knows exactly what I mean. To a man, every Celtic fan I’ve spoken to that’s seen it has said the same thing. “Just like he did to us in Seville”. So in hindsight, I get the impression “The Speical One” was scared of us and what we might do.

Of course, there’s more than just dirty tricks to the negative side of football. What about we play like Rangers? We know it works. They’ve won the title twice in a row now. They even made it to the UEFA Cup final in Manchester. They must be as good as what O’Neill did!

Aye right. By the end of that UEFA Cup run they had I was ready to top myself. I honestly didn’t watch the final. Partly because I couldn’t have suffered them if they had won, but mainly because I’d seen enough of them in the previous rounds that I couldn’t physically watch another one of their games without losing the will to live. They were AWFUL to watch. Yet it worked, at least until they met Zenit St Petersburg. That UEFA Cup run will annoy me for a good while to come because they think it’s somehow comparable to ours. Ours where we played some brilliant stuff, beat some top European teams and burst a gut the whole way, compared with packing the defence and nicking goals. It’s horrible. Although I do take some consolation in the fact that I at least got to cheer a couple of times during our final (cheers Henrik), while they never even got close. I actually still can’t watch Rangers after that season. I still want to see them lose, I just can’t suffer my way through another one of their dire games in the hope that they do. They may not have been as effective in Europe as they were that season, but it’s still awful to watch. It’s bad enough watching them four times a season when we play them. I mean, look at the last time we played them at Celtic Park. They were rotten, barely in the game… and the scumbags still got a draw! So it obviously works to a certain extent. Although I suppose Sevilla, Stuttgart and Unirea might argue the case.
So could you take that? Would you take that? Could you support a Celtic team that would play well one week, grind out a result the next, and dive and cheat and play act and time-waste once we met a decent team? Would you take a Mourinho for his success even knowing how he gets it? Would you put up with the backs to the wall and hope to nick something week in week out like Walter Nosurname? I’m not sure I could. It’s not “The Celtic Way” as the song goes. But you can’t argue that it doesn’t work. Inter Milan are in the Champions League final this year. Porto are in the history books as the UEFA Cup winners of 2003. The SPL trophy is… well, it’s not where it should be.

I think I’ll stick with Jock Stein’s philosophy. The best way to counteract the negativity is to play the beautiful, inventive football. Celtic managed to find a way through a packed defence in Lisbon in 1967, so it’s not as if it’s impossible. I’ve even see Celtic do it more recently. One late night SPL game against Billy Davies’ Motherwell at Celtic Park during Martin O’Neill’s reign at Celtic for instance. Motherwell turned up to get 0-0. I know that’s not uncommon for SPL teams, but this was taking it too far. On a number of occasions I watched Motherwell boot the ball into the Celtic half and not bother chasing it! They pretty much kept 11 men in their own half the entire game, and Billy Davies – in a suit three sizes too big for him I seem to remember – looked on from the sidelines with pride. Andy Goram was playing for them at the time and every single goal kick took a good minute or so to take. Eighty minutes of this we had to endure, just hoping Celtic would score.

Then up stepped Lubo Moravcik to curl one in from a free kick. Goram was sick. It was brilliant. Then, just to rub it in, we taught them how to time-waste properly. Taking the ball into the corner while keeping it in play. Textbook stuff, I loved every minute of those last ten plus about half an hour of injury time which you suspect only appeared because we had scored. Football 1, Negativity 0.
No, here is a line that you shouldn’t cross in this game. Winning is all important, yes. I conceded that, even though I was one of those Celtic fans that moaned about the football Gordon Strachan’s Celtic were playing. I still think I’m right about that – from the position we were in we should have been striving to better ourselves but we rested on our laurels and just did “enough” until it was no longer enough. In hindsight, I’m not entirely convinced that was completely down to the manager mind you. I think a combination of malaise at boardroom level and questionable attitude at playing staff level may have combined to put us in that position. But that’s a debate for another day.

Celtic’s next manager will have all of this to contend with. My advice to whoever that may be is this. You have to keep some kind of integrity. We all want to get back to winning ways, but we’re not going to mortgage our morality for it. There is a line that cannot be crossed. As for the beautiful football? Well, lets follow the Barcelona fans way of thinking and start with phase one. The time for beautiful football was midway through Strachan’s tenure when we were already winning. We need to get back to winning first. Once we’re winning again, then the beautiful football can come along later. Although if you happen to be another Stein or O’Neill, I’m not going to knock back the combination if you can manage it. It seems to work fairly well!