The Hoops boss is hanging on to his job after a nightmare start but the Parkhead board are not easy to second guess
Under pressure Celtic boss Wilfried Nancy
There might have been a fair few Celtic fans who got excited on Monday morning when news broke about a big team binning a manager who was wedded to his system but failing to get results.
Those same hearts will have sunk when they learned it was Ruben Amorim staggering out of Old Trafford with the plant pot under his arm rather than the current encumber of the smouldering Parkhead hotseat.
Wifried Nancy remains in place at Celtic. For now.
And a lot will be wondering how – and why?
There are plenty of parallels that can be drawn between Nancy and Amorim. There’s the formation for a start.
Like the now ex-Manchester United boss, Nancy is a disciple of the flexible 3-4-3 set up, despite it being notoriously difficult without a specific set of players.
Amorim did bend a tad this season when he was starting to look doomed, but even in his darkest days in the second half of last season at Old Trafford, he simply refused to budge.
The Portuguese famously said ‘not even the Pope’ could convince him to change his approach.
He might have had a point, mind you. Pope Leo is apparently a Roma fan – where legendary Italian boss Gianluca Gasperini is one of the few gaffers in top level football to make 3-4-3 sing.
Celtic fans got to see it in action a few weeks ago – only the Hoops didn’t have a prayer.
Nancy now looks to be needing divine intervention for any kind of redemption at Parkhead.
And if there is to be a way back from this abyss, he might need to sell his soul and abandon his approach.
Even talking about a way back seems otherworldly when a Celtic manager has lost six games out of eight, including a cup final and a derby.
The fact this run has happened at the very start of his reign has probably kept him in a gig to this point.
If this was a period in isolation in a wider spell in charge, he’d be a goner. Nancy could have been a Treble winner the previous season but half a dozen disastrous defeats would have had the Sky News breaking news ticker tape scrolling.
At least it would at most clubs of a similar stature with similar demands.
Except Celtic don’t often work like other clubs. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing.
Not many clubs have tens of millions in reserve and have won 13 out of 14 titles.
But on other occasions, their actions are beyond head scratching. Like having tens of millions in reserve and having their poorest squad for about 20-odd years.
Not many clubs stick out statements attacking fans, attempting to demolish the reputation of a manager who quit after failing to work out why the plan was to downsize from a position of strength.
A normal club wouldn’t have sold Kyogo last January without a replacement lined up. A normal club would have replaced the frontman first thing in the summer, rather than selling the only other realistic striker on the books and still not doing the business in the first minutes of January.
But Celtic don’t do normal.
(Image: Getty Images)
Even back the last time a manager was under severe pressure, the decision came months down the line.
During the Covid campaign, Neil Lennon was right up against it on a run of just two wins in 11 games.
In fairness to Lenny, five of them were in Europe, but that was in the period of wild protests outside Parkhead.
Yet he survived all the way to February, and eventually went after defeat to Ross County on the back of four wins.
So good luck second guessing chief decision maker Dermot Desmond at any point.
The Irish tycoon has surprised folk with blockbuster appointments like Rodgers, then bewildered with others like Nancy and then digging in when it looks like the event horizon has been long crossed.
Desmond has had more than a passing interest in Manchester United over the years too, of course, and that’s why this Amorim decision is relevant up here.
His last stand was basically blaming his board for not giving him the players to play in the way he wanted. It took 14 months to figure out it wasn’t happening but that can’t happen in Glasgow.
Likewise, Nancy, if – and it’s a major if – he can stumble on then he will stand or fall over the backing he gets.
Celtic cannot play this way with the current staff. They were barely able to get by in more conventional means but Martin O’Neill found a way, as Rodgers mainly did before him until the wheels came off the Honda Civic.
Nancy can – rightly – point to individual errors and it’s true, some of the players are killing him with daft mistakes.
But it does all stem from the fact they all look spooked by the switch in style. They can make it work in short bursts but any time there is heat applied they retreat back into their positional comfort zones but are left betwixt and between.
Nancy might be pulling his hair out because they are not sticking to his plan but it’s all because the plan has never been nailed down properly.
And that’s why Celtic are now stuck in this twilight zone between going all in on the boss or admitting it was too big a risk and trying to salvage something out of the season.
There’s an old Japanese proverb that says if you get on the wrong train, get off at the next available station, as the longer you wait, the more expensive the return journey.
The Celtic train is at the station and the doors are beeping, but with normal behaviour not applying, the destination is anyone’s guess.