The reddest face at the Daily Record…

On the afternoon of November 14 Gannon broke the big news with the Record reporting:

Record Sport can reveal the Columbus Crew head coach is Parkhead powerbroker Dermot Desmond’s No.1 target – and discussions with club chiefs are planned for this weekend with a view to nailing down a deal.

Four days later Gannon dismissed any suggestion that the new manager would flop.

He was not the French Deila. Nancy was more experienced, street wise and tooled up. Deila wasn’t a success at Celtic but compared to the disaster that was Nancy he was peak Pep.

Gannon reassured Celtic fans about their new leader:

It’ll be a whole new world for Nancy if this deal gets nudged over the line as expected.

Yet this is not like the Delia move. While the bold Ronny defied the odds to win the Norwegian title, the step up for Nancy in terms of the actual job won’t be as wild.

Columbus Crew are no small town outfit. The 48-year-old has an extensive coaching staff, analysts, fitness and conditioning experts, he was backed by a superb recruitment set up. He had all the bells and whistles.

Delia didn’t have half of that stuff. He was parachuted in to Celtic on his Todd and it was hardly a surprise he struggled at times with the culture shock.

Nancy will be more prepared. He might meet the similar resistance Delia got, however, and then Ange Postecoglou after him.

The in-built snobbery among some fans when faced with something of the unknown.

In a lot of ways, Nancy is the kind of manager Celtic should be looking to. Okay, the circumstances are rough, with the club midseason with a pile of problems.

SNOBBERY OR ROBBERY?

The in-built snobbery was to assume that Nancy, coming from the MLS was an inspired appointment by Celtic. It wasn’t. He only got the job because Paul Tisdale had previously worked with his assistant, Kwame Ampadu. At Exeter City, basement fodder in the EFL.

Gannon then turned to the Thierry Henry comparison, an outstanding player that couldn’t cut it in management. Big name players rarely cut it in management, two very different jobs.

But it might come down to the name. If Thierry Henry has stayed out in the States and won the MLS Cup, would Celtic fans be happy with him?

Too right they would. So why scoff at this guy, who is cleary rated as one of the best head coaches in Major League Soccer and has been tipped to make the jump to Europe for more than a year?

Maybe because no American coach has made a success of managing in Europe. Nancy is French but had spent 20 years in Canada and the USA,

After explaining why Celtic can’t get an £8m-a-year Gannon offered this gem:

The other option is to think outside the box and grab a boss on the way up. A hungry coach with potential, give him the platform and see what happens.

OUT THE BOX?

Great idea, but clearly not Nancy. What sort of fool would think that Nicholson could think out the box. That he could identify a brilliant up and coming manager. At the age of 48 no other major club had spotted the brilliance of Nancy.

Twenty years coaching soccer is no apprenticeship for managing Celtic. Nancy won’t surface again in Europe.

The MLS is the natural habitat to experiment with his 3-4-3 soccerball vision.

Soccer fans will thrill at sending nine players into attack and getting beaten 4-3. Top entertainment, served up with burgers and popcorn then home again and forgotten all about. Soccer is theatre in the States, in Scotland, in Glasgow it is life itself for many.

It seems that Gannon’s judgement is just as flawed as that of Nicholson and Tisdale- maybe he is getting lined up for a job in the Celtic Recruitment department?