A (respectful) open letter to Ronny Deila

Dear Ronny,

This isn't easy for me to write. Why? Because I like you.

Not only that – I respect and admire you. I like the way you conduct yourself. You demonstrate a dignity that is all too rare in football.

You display admirable self-confidence without coming across as arrogant. You seem like a man who has a strong sense of values; who treats people with respect.

And more – you are clearly intelligent. When I watched you deliver that lecture in Norwegian about developing people, I was hugely impressed.  For the record, I also think your are good at your job.

The trouble is, as one of your supporters, I'm experiencing gnawing doubts about your ability to do your job at my club at this time.

People talk about a football club being “in the blood”. And I understand that. But that could suggest that supporting a club can be a passive, programmed experience.

For me, it's much more than that. Celtic is a part of my identity. I'm a reasonably well-educated guy with what I believe to be an above-average level of intelligence. And yet I think about Celtic every day, many times a day and have done for as long as I can remember.

If I am lucky enough to end my life in the comfort of my bed, I will be thinking about Celtic that day.

If I'm ever given that dreaded news, I'll be wondering what will happen to Celtic after I'm gone.

What happens at Celtic matters to me profoundly. It matters where the club is going, how we play, if we are meeting the standards we should, if our values are being upheld and, also, how we treat people.

When I meet with people, we talk about weighty matters and those that cause us to experience high emotion. Life, politics and Celtic. We flit from one to the other seamlessly.

For my part, I want our club and fans to treat you well but I also need something from you. I need to believe that you can do the job we require.

And I hope you will think of yourself, too. I'm not calling for your head. I don't have any pet candidate who I would like to get the job.

David Moyes? Sure he could be good for the club if the conditions were right.

Neil Lennon? He gave us everything he had but he left for a reason and I see no evidence that that has changed.

Alan Stubbs? Paul Hartley? Some day, maybe, but several years from now.

Owen Coyle, Ryan Giggs, Michael O'Neill? No, no and no again.

And part of the reason why I wouldn't want even David Moyes is that I don't believe the conditions at the club are conducive to anyone taking the team forward.

I don't trust Dermot Desmond. I have read too much about his past business dealings to have any confidence in him and his strategy for Celtic.

Desmond, apart from anything else, buys low and sells high, which is great for business but soul-destroying for football fans. Desmond, I suspect, wants to manage Celtic “efficiently” (which is political-speak for frugally) and jettison the club if circumstances allow him to make a massive return on his investment. He did something like that with City of London Airport.

Planes take off and land, hopefully with a monotonous safety that becomes mundane. We do not need exciting flights.

But, to apply that wait-and-build-value in football requires patience and a disregard for how the club performs in any area not immediately recorded on the balance sheet.

I do not trust Peter Lawwell's stewardship of the club. I believe he is competent, professional and utterly disinterested in Plebeian concerns such as watching a team fans can be proud of.

I hear people saying that he is just following Desmond's orders but that's not how a Chief Executive works. A Chief Executive devises and implements a strategy to achieve the aims of the Board of Directors. How he does it is largely up to him and he stands or falls by his decisions.

If that is not true, I will offer to take his job “following orders” for one-twentieth of his £1,000,000 per year take-home pay. Yes, I'm that easily-bought.

I now have no faith in John Parks. I remember when it was supposed to be a real coup to have landed him from Hibs.

There was a scare story that we might lose him – the man who found Scott Brown, Kevin Thomson, Garry O'Connor and Derek Riordan, apparently.

But it seems to me that our roving international scout has been taking a scatter-gun approach to player recruitment.

Frankly, most of the players we sign from outside the UK are not very good but let's not be accused of racism – neither are a lot of the players from the British Isles. We appear to be scouring the globe, mining shovelfuls of coal in the hope of coming across a saleable diamond.

Exciting for Desmond, spinning the wheel of fortune until the arrow lands on the jackpot, but tedious for the fans watching movement without purpose.

And, now, the Celtic men. Ronny, I don't rate your coaching staff. Like many Celtic fans, I feel an almost protective instinct towards John Kennedy that would be pretty ironic to anyone who had seen the young man at full power before a Romanian thug named Ioan Ganea ruined his career through sheer malice.

John should be looking at the end of his playing career right now and I badly want him to be a success but there's the rub – he's “defensive coach” and the defence is absolutely, utterly, abysmal. You must have seen that, too, right?

So, either John is responsible and just not very good at his job or you are to blame for the relentless screw-ups that have scuppered most of our ambitions for the past season-and-a-bit. But, Ronny, if you are in charge of your coaching staff, you are also responsible for their performance. And that alludes to one of the big questions. Is John just carrying out your instructions or are you entrusting him with teaching the defenders how to defend?

Looking after our own is laudable but we don't owe people a living at the expense of the team. If John is responsible for giving us a defence that can defend, I'm sorry to say that he has to go. Could you sack him if you wanted to?

Would you be allowed that authority? And, if John is not to blame, perhaps you could explain why, as Head Coach, you have disregarded that simple wisdom that the first thing you have to do is stop losing goals.

87 minutes of work to create six scoring opportunities and two goals can be undone in three minutes if your team can't defend. It's like slogging your guts out to make money that you stuff into pockets with holes in them. You must know this.

 I also have my doubts about John Collins. Now, let's get this straight – I watched him play for Celtic from the Jungle. He was damned good at what he did. Skill, movement, passing, always with an eye for goal.

He had his own little tackling technique, sliding in and trapping the ball between his legs so he could jump to his feet in possession when many other players were content to just knock it away from the player who had been on the ball.

I was there – in what we used to call the “Rangers” end (named after a defunct club that once challenged us strongly) when Celtic overturned a 2-0 deficit against Cologne.

You should have seen Collins that night – magnificent, imperious – choose your own adjective. We thrashed them and he was the best player on show.

You should have felt the atmosphere that night, and witnessed the goal he scored to make it 3-0. My God, he could play.

When he left us, it left a sour taste because we were really stiffed over the move that made John a very wealthy man. The Bosman ruling covered employment in the European Union but he went to the tax haven of Monaco, a non-EU member, enjoying the full benefits of the free transfer as if UEFA and Europe were one and the same.

It hurt us badly because, if we were going to lose the player, we needed some transfer cash to replace him. But I – more-or-less – forgave him because there were also rumours that had Rangers had tried to gazump his move from Hibs to Celtic and he would have earned far more money there. So much for “full disclosure”.

What is he bringing to Celtic? I have heard many great things about his knowledge of football and coaching. I would like to see the results of this at Celtic. So, I would ask again – what is John Collins contributing and, if the answer is not clear, could you sack him if you wanted to?

Would two Norwegian coaches help you to realise your vision?

 Ronny, in that Norwegian presentation I mentioned earlier, you talked of a time when things had started to go wrong with your team in Norway.

Your response impressed me. You asked the players and were disappointed with their answer.

Then you asked someone else – an agent, I believe – and he gave a similar answer. And you were open-minded to the possibility that you might have been wrong. That's a fantastic quality to have.

Do you have a similar response to what is going wrong at Celtic?

I'm only one fan and I speak only for myself. But, as a randomly-chosen sample fan, I need to know that you can see how to make this better.

I want Celtic to be Scottish champions again. I believe that we will win the league under you. If the defence of the title starts to crumble, I WILL be calling for your replacement.

But, as one fan, I need something from you. I need to see that you can put a team on the field that can defend as well as attack, that doesn't overly rely on Leigh Griffiths for goals, that can keep 11 men on the park and that doesn't crumble when tough questions are asked.

And here is my proposition to you – which should benefit everyone.

Between now and the end of May, please show that, having learned from past mistakes, you are the guy to lead us into your third European campaign, confident that you can take us to the Champions League as contenders for second-place in the group, not grateful to be in the Europa League because we fear what might have happened against a higher standard of opposition.

I think that's a reasonable request.

Win us the League and use the next four months or so to show us that you can take us forward.

And I believe you should make whatever tough decisions are necessary to achieve that. Read about Jock Stein giving Bobby Murdoch – who he described as the best footballer he ever managed – to Jack Charlton at Middlesbrough. Or replacing Tommy Gemell with David Hay for the 1969 League Cup final.

Tough decisions that hurt people who deserved better. But tough decisions have to be made sometimes.

If we win, but without answering the questions about how you put a decent team on the pitch, I would urge you to resign from a position of strength and with your reputation intact.

You are not to blame for everything that is wrong with Celtic. Most of us know that you didn't create the mess masquerading as Celtic, treating the fans as fools.

And, sadly, I doubt that anyone replacing you will make things much better. But we need a manager who can show us that he can deliver a team capable of competing in the way that we should. If you are that man, please prove it.

If you are not the man (yet), then it would suit all of us if you took what you had learned from managing in a high-pressure job and moved forward with your career. As a Celtic fan, I don't want to see another European campaign like the last two.

And I don't want you to experience how it will feel if we are humiliated again. It won't be pretty to watch. And I could even say that it's not you; it's us.

I hope you do turn it around and I believe you have it in you. One more thing – if you are Celtic manager next season, don't talk about trebles.

Really – no one at the club told you that? --