Glenn Gibbons: Dignified but dour, Tony Mowbray lacked personality for Celtic

ABSOLUTION may be too much to ask, but even the least forgiving of irate Celtic supporters will surely concede that Tony Mowbray at least bequeathed the club a worthwhile legacy: he left the directors with a comprehensive identikit picture of the kind of manager who should not be allowed anywhere near the Old Firm.

Of all the questions surrounding the big Englishman's abortive tenure as manager of the Parkhead club, the most vexing is how he managed to land the job in the first place. Mowbray's curriculum vitae – he came straight from one ignominious season in the Premier League with relegated West Bromwich Albion, following a period with a ready-made Hibernian side he left in the same position in which he found them – should have been sufficient to deny him candidature, far less appointment.

But it was the similarity of his personality with the least successful Celtic and Rangers managers of recent history that should have alerted chairman John Reid, chief executive Peter Lawwell and major shareholder Dermot Desmond to the profound risk of putting him in charge.

Like John Barnes at Celtic Park and Paul Le Guen at Ibrox, Mowbray suffered conspicuously from a lack of devil, an absence of the mischievous gleam in the eye that is utterly essential to anyone with aspirations to handling the rigours of Old Firm management. It is an arena that is as merciless as a Louisiana cockpit and requires a readiness to take on the world. Mowbray seemed ill-prepared to take on even some of the incompetent referees his team encountered.

The Scottish FA may bluster all they wish about the need to respect the integrity of its match officials, but supporters want to hear their managers fight their club's corner with a rant against injustice when they believe they have a case. When Walter Smith last year impugned the actions of linesman Tom Murphy, Rangers supporters acclaimed him as their champion.

Mowbray's team this season have had to endure a series of bad calls, especially in the first two matches against Rangers, but he remained impassive, presumably his way of evincing "dignity". That is an ideal that does not necessarily have to be entirely sacrificed when managing one of the Glasgow giants, but there are times, in the cause of expediency, when it has to be left in the bottom drawer.

Innate dourness is a characteristic that is unlikely to survive exposure to the vicissitudes of the Old Firm and Mowbray had it in spades. Frank McGarvey the other day not only referred to him as "the unhappiest Celtic manager I've ever seen", but, with unerring insight, highlighted the danger of spreading the dullness like a contagion. "My old team-mate, Peter Grant (Mowbray's assistant]," said McGarvey, "is usually so enthusiastic, but he is lifeless on the bench."

In a sentence, the former Celtic striker captured the most damaging consequence of Mowbray's personality: that it would transfer itself to the players and leave its imprint on the collective. Celtic under Mowbray have been a monument to the football axiom that a team reflects the character of its manager: bland, lifeless, aimless and uncomprehending.

A couple of months ago, I asked him if he felt damaged by his experience in the job. When he said he didn't understand, I expanded: "Well, for example, do you feel as good now as you did on the day you started?" His reply was a rambling monologue about how it was a timeline and like a bus journey, and if you stop the bus at certain points, you'll find different circumstances.

"I mean," he concluded, "if you stop the bus now, you might think things aren't going so well, but if you stop it a couple of years down the line and a treble has been won, you might look back and think 'Those first six months were a bit difficult, but it's a lot different now'."

When I argued that the timeline may have applied to Hibs and West Brom, but not to Celtic – and especially not at a time when, as a club, they enjoyed what should have been a telling financial advantage over their fiercest rivals – Mowbray disagreed. This tended to confirm the long-held impression that, in terms of appreciating the requirements of an Old Firm manager, he, like Barnes and Le Guen, didn't get it.

At the core of the manager's work was a fundamental failure to understand the nature of the Old Firm, and, specifically, what is required of the half of that partnership who is currently standing in the other's shadow. This is, perhaps, no surprise. Even if Mowbray did spend four years at the club as a player, it was at a time when, pre-Fergus McCann, they were under Rangers' yoke.

In those four seasons, from 1991-92, Celtic finished third, third, fourth and fourth in the league, each time deteriorating in terms of matches won and points gained. In his final season – McCann's first – Celtic won only six of 18 home games and a total of 11 from 36 in the campaign, ending 18 points behind Rangers.

This is not to argue, of course, that Mowbray was single-handedly responsible for Celtic's decline during his four years at the heart of the defence. But, in the context of the luck required of anyone to be successful, it was more suggestive of a hoodoo than a talisman. In that respect, history has just completed one of its notorious repeat cycles.