Celtic's reputation as football cavaliers who win with flair is laughably outdated, as Tony Mowbray found to his cost

FEW FOOTBALL clubs embrace their own mythology quite like Celtic. They hang on to the folklore like a drowning man would a raft, speaking of the Celtic Way while telling themselves they are somehow different to the other lot, the vulgar team in blue with their anti-football and their negativity and their grinding performances that rarely allow for free spirit and flights of fancy.

Celtic, goes the fable, are about beautiful football, about "success with flair" as John Reid, their chairman puts it. It's their way of things, their duty to the deities in their past.

On the day they unveiled Tony Mowbray as the successor to Gordon Strachan there was a feeling in the room, emanating from Reid and his chief executive, Peter Lawwell, and also held dear by the few fans allowed through the door, that Celtic were going back to their traditions. Mowbray, they said, had strong emotional connections with the club. He was, they stressed and re-stressed, a proud member of the Celtic family whose philosophy on how the game should be played chimed perfectly with the history of the place.

Nobody said that Strachan hadn't possessed these qualities, but nobody needed to. Everybody knew that he wasn't Celtic minded. Talking later to some journalists, Reid acknowledged Strachan's great success in winning three consecutive SPL titles as well as two separate visits to the last 16 of the Champions League, but the chairman also allowed the impression to be formed that the brand of football Strachan had deployed wasn't in keeping with the story of the club. Mowbray promised to bring artistry to Parkhead, as their roots supposedly demanded.

"The great enemy of the truth," said John F Kennedy, "is myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." Lawwell and Reid bought the myth. They endorsed Mowbray's hair-brained notion of spending a season or two rebuilding his team even if it meant the likely loss of trophies. Even when the folly of his vision became abundantly obvious to anybody with eyes in their head, Mowbray received Lawwell's and Reid's public support. Reid said the club owed the manager its "moral backing" as he continued the redevelopment of the team. This creation of his would be carefully sculpted and reborn as a great footballing machine sometime in the future, a team full of elegance and craft, some kind of throwback to the way things were at Parkhead, circa the Tommy Burns years, which produced a whole load of lovely football but just one piece of silverware.

The truth is that most of Celtic's greatest days in recent times were delivered on the back of the self-same qualities Walter Smith has brought to Rangers, qualities that Mowbray, in his befuddlement, seemed to demean in the wake of his epoch-making loss at St Mirren – namely, pragmatism and organisation and desire. A dogged refusal to get beaten was the raison d'etre of Martin O'Neill's Celtic. Sure, he had fabulous footballers at his disposal. And there was majesty in the ranks, no doubt about it. But above all other things – guile and goals – it was their manly acceptance of the pressure of Old Firm life that made them a success. They were fine players, but more than that, they were stand-up guys.

Same with Wim Jansen's team. They didn't play particularly cosmic football, as Strachan would call it. But they played winning football. Strachan was cut from a similar cloth. When they appointed Mowbray and gave him the go-ahead to rip asunder a side that had won three titles and that had taken a fourth to the last day of the season, Lawwell and Reid forget their history. Celtic's prime duty to their fans and their traditions is not pretty football, but successful football. That is it. Full stop. End of story. Glorious failure (Burns) is in their DNA, and it is celebrated, but the thing they crave the most is victory. If the play is attractive into the bargain, then great. But every legend who ever walked in the door of the place would tell you that their primary responsibility was to win.

That was lost under Mowbray. But it wasn't the only thing that was lost. Celtic's thinking has become distracted. Their famous paranoia was in danger of spiralling out of control had Mowbray stayed. Somebody needed to start banging heads together, but there was nobody. As sure as their board of directors bought the myth of the Celtic Way when opting for Mowbray they also bought the fantasy that everybody is out to get them; referees, journalists, the Scottish Football Association. They wallowed in the face of bad luck and awful refereeing decisions. A few weeks ago we stated in this space that their woe-is-us mentality, their apparent search for people to blame for their failing plight was a form of sporting cowardice. They had a bad situation on their hands and the way they opted to deal with it was to whinge incessantly instead of knuckling down like good professionals and trying to do something to arrest the decline.

One of the problems is that they are so wrapped up in their own myth as victims nobody seemed to stand up. Certainly nobody stood up at St Mirren when things were going horrendously wrong the other night. What was that if not a shameful capitulation? That's partly because Mowbray cleared out a lot of the men who might have said or done something in these circumstances. Paul Hartley might have tried to snap them out of their self-pity. Or Stephen McManus. Or Gary Caldwell. Or Barry Robson. Or Scott McDonald. But those guys aren't around anymore. Some Celtic fans will tell you that most of that lot needed to go, that they weren't good enough for Celtic. Not good enough for the fantasy Celtic of Mowbray's imagination, perhaps. But plenty good enough to go to St Mirren and get a result, no?

Finally, on Friday, we heard the things that needed to be said. We heard straight-talking and none of the fanciful guff of Mowbray's misguided months. The brutal honesty and the sharp focus came, of course, from Neil Lennon, a strangely peripheral figure in the Mowbray regime. Maybe he was too grounded in reality to be welcomed into the inner-circle, but he's the man now in any event. Maybe his inexperience is going to catch him out in the short term, but there was power in his words on Friday, there was a defiance and a straightforwardness about what he said that smacked of his great mentor, O'Neill.

"I have told them that Wednesday night was totally unacceptable," said Lennon. "I never want to see that again. I made it pretty clear what is expected of them between now and the end of the season. I want them to play from the gut. They have their professional pride to play for with ten games left. They need to restore the club's reputation and their own. I think there is a softness about us. I'd like to eradicate that. I think mentally we're not as strong as we should be. Rangers have shown over the course of the season that they are quite able to grind out results and we've not been able to do that, we've only done it sporadically. I think there should be more of a tempo to our play as well, more concerted pressure, which I don't think we have enough of."

Lennon spoke of wanting his team to have the same mentality as O'Neill's, wanting them to play hard, professional football and not accepting defeat. He didn't talk about the Celtic Way or his duty to entertain or his intention to win matches down the line at some stage. He knows how things are in Glasgow. The first step to being true to Celtic's traditions is to win. It's not rocket science, though his predecessor made it so at times.

The board will be hoping against hope that Lennon can make a fist of this. Whether he has the coaching nous remains to be seen, but he's got a lot of other things in his locker, things like hunger and passion and commonsense, commodities that are far more relevant than the things that Lawwell and Reid saw in Mowbray on the day they presented him as the returning Messiah. Now that they've got their head out of the clouds again, maybe they can move forward.