To feel the heat is a given for any Old Firm manager, and Celtic boss Wilfried Nancy has a cauldron bubbling beneath him.<\/p>\n
Just over four weeks since he was announced as the permanent successor to Brendan Rodgers, he has lost five of his seven matches in charge.<\/p>\n
Consequently, Nancy is under enormous pressure before Saturday’s derby against Rangers, not least from his own club’s supporters.<\/p>\n
After defeats by Hearts and Dundee United in the Scottish Premiership, Roma in the Europa League and St Mirren in the Premier Sports Cup final, back-to-back league wins against Aberdeen and Livingston appeared to have steadied the ship.<\/p>\n
However, Celtic were then outplayed and outfought on Tuesday as Motherwell swept to a fully deserved 2-0 win, and anger from Fir Park’s away end was apparent throughout.<\/p>\n
Celtic are three points behind leaders Hearts, while Rangers would join Nancy’s side on 38 points with a win at Parkhead.<\/p>\n
In a remarkable media conference before his first big derby, Nancy launched a passionate defence of himself and his team on Friday.<\/p>\n
He delivered an extraordinary response to talk about his methods, including one answer that lasted seven minutes, as the game itself played second fiddle to the Frenchman and his job security.<\/p>\n
“I know your job is to attack me, or to ask a lot of questions, no problem with that,” Nancy said. “My job is to be a coach, your job is to ask questions.<\/p>\n
“If you want to judge me now, you can do it. I didn’t have the results we wanted – it’s a fact, I cannot deny that.”<\/p>\n
He appealed for patience, but immediately accepted this is a job where the high stakes mean patience is in short supply.<\/p>\n
“This is only the beginning. Usually, we have four or five weeks of pre-season. I didn’t have that,” Nancy said.<\/p>\n
“The reality is, before I came, I knew if I didn’t win games, I was going to be in trouble. This is part of the job. I’m pleased to be here and I know where we are now.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To feel the heat is a given for any Old Firm manager, and Celtic boss Wilfried Nancy has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224285,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-224284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}