Glenn Gibbons: Mowbray digging a hole in the dug-out as Celtic toil

Published on Friday 27 November 2009 22:51

SCOTTISH football has long been a fertile ground on which to cultivate the savage put-down, but the particular troubles of the Old Firm at present are helping to breed sarcasms in the same class as some of the most celebrated in literature.

In one of Damon Runyon's uniquely-styled stories, for example, Ambrose Hammer, "the newspaper scribe", criticises the performance of a hammy Hamlet merely by referring to the theatre's most obvious structural flaw: it is that the seats have been built facing the stage.

The acerbic Dorothy Parker's famous review of one of Katharine Hepburn's opening nights on Broadway concisely noted that the widely worshipped actor "ran the whole gamut of the emotions from A to B".

Following Celtic's latest spineless capitulation, at Tannadice last Sunday, the most wounding insult anyone could direct at Tony Mowbray (and, of course, thousands of the disenchanted already have) is simply to point out that his managerial endeavours have actually made his team worse than Rangers.

At this stage, Celtic having already lost to their rivals in a direct match-up and now trailing them in the Premier League having played a game more, it is futile for either Mowbray or any of his apologists – if they could be found – to argue the point.

Hepburn, of course, not only survived Parker's bite, but flourished. It is a prospect for Mowbray that seems to be receding by the week. It is his misfortune that the seats at Celtic Park and at every other stadium they visit still face the pitch. The team's present position would be alarming enough for Celtic supporters at any time, but their misgivings about the manager probably deepen whenever he makes a public utterance.

In the wake of the defeat by Dundee United, he claimed that there was a gulf in quality between his team and the winners. If he truly believes that what Celtic produced at Tannadice is great football, we must infer that he has spent so long in the lower orders of the game that his judgment has become distorted to the point where he believes that an ordinary second-tier player – that is, one from the Championship in England or a minor talent from the continent – has the package required to fulfil the ambitions of Old Firm fans.

It seems hardly credible that a board of directors familiar with the unremitting demands of Celtic could consider Mowbray – relegated from the Premier League after finishing last – to have the credentials. The manager made much of his having inherited a substandard squad from Gordon Strachan, while his own recruits so far hardly appear formidable. Worse, though, is the ever-growing impression that a number of players already at the club when he arrived seem, under his charge, to have deteriorated.