League form was inconsistent. There were some fine performances – they beat Aberdeen, the main challengers home and away, for example – but there were also some shockers. Hamilton Accies for example came to Celtic Park at the beginning of October and won 1-0, and the week between Christmas and the New Year saw a 0-0 draw with Ross County at Celtic Park which actually deserved a lot more boos than it got.
It was the Scottish League Cup which saw Celtic’s two best performances in autumn 2014 – 3-0 v Hearts and 6-0 v Partick Thistle both at Parkhead in front of crowds of less than 20,000. The absent thousands missed a great Guidetti hat-trick against Thistle, but the size of that crowd said quite a lot about how the defeat against Maribor still hurt.
Indeed even for League games, the crowds were down to about 40,000, and they weren’t always well entertained. There was little wrong with Craig Gordon, Scott Brown, Virgil van Dijk, Jason Denayer and John Guidetti, but Efe Ambrose remained astonishingly accident prone and Emilio Izaguirre retained his infuriating habit of charging up the left wing beating several men, and then belting the ball hard and fast across the penalty area without looking up to see if there were any men there waiting!
Good progress was also made in the Scottish Cup with a 4-0 win over Hearts at Tynecastle in a game played eccentrically at the end of November, but it was the New Year that made a difference and in many ways brought an improvement. January saw four good League wins with not a goal conceded and the team now back at the top of the League after a slight wobble at the end of December.
But the game that really fired the supporters up was the game on February 1 at Hampden – the first ever game against the new Rangers since the death of the old ones in 2012. Celtic ignored most of the hype about this game, scored twice in the first half through Griffiths and Commons and were professional enough to hold out for the rest of the game. The game and its atmosphere were hardly pleasant – they seldom are – but it was almost nice to feel a certain normality returning, for wise Celtic supporters realised that Scottish football without a Rangers was not really a very good idea. Be that as it may, Celtic supporters now realised that February was here, and the team was still in four tournaments!
They also benefitted from something else. The January transfer window is often much over-rated, and we recalled the awful year of 2010 when Tony Mowbray had almost tried to rebuild the whole team in January with dreadful results. Nevertheless, this year Ronny had a good window, and it all came from the city of Discovery which would play a large part now in the rest of Celtic’s season.
Dundee United in what can only be described as “asset stripping” or even more crudely “money grubbing” saw fit to sell Gary Mackay-Steven and Stuart Armstrong to Celtic. Such naked greed got its reward in the shape of relegation in the future and we had the outlandish situation of Armstrong and Mackay-Steven helping Dundee United reach the final of the Scottish League Cup by beating Aberdeen on 31 January, but then immediately joining their opponents in the Final!
Admittedly, they could not play in the Final, but they were on the Celtic payroll and sat in the stand with green and white buttonhole flowers.
Celtic now took control of the SPL and a 4-0 beating of Aberdeen on 1 March at Parkhead more or less finished things even though Celtic immediately turned careless and lost inexplicably 0-1 to St Johnstone in midweek. The League was clinched emphatically on the Friday night of 1 May with a 5-0 beating of Dundee at Celtic Park, although it wasn’t formally confirmed until the following afternoon when Aberdeen failed to beat Dundee United at Tannadice.
Celtic’s departure from Europe in late February was at least spectacular and they went down with all guns blazing to old friends Inter Milan, both teams having fallen on bad times since 1967. 3-3 at Parkhead represented a spirited comeback, and then 0-1 in Milan had a lot to do with the harsh sending off of Virgil van Dijk. But at least Celtic departed Europe with their heads held high and with the respect of their supporters.
In the Scottish Cup Celtic had defeated Dundee 2-0 at Dens Park in early February, then returned to Dundee United a month later. It was a strange game, strangely refereed by Craig Thomson who sent off three men (at least one of them mistaken identity) as Celtic were really rather lucky to get a draw over the depleted Dundee United.
But Celtic now played Dundee United another three times in a row in the Scottish League Cup final, the Scottish Cup replay and then the League – and they won them all, the League Cup final bringing particular joy for Ronny Deila who had now won his first Scottish trophy in the game where, with Celtic winning 2-0, James Forrest insisted on taking a penalty kick…and missed out.
But so far so good for Ronny Deila who seemed to have won over the Celtic fans who now included “Ron…Ron…Ronny Deila” in their repertoire which went down particularly well with those old enough to recall Tom Jones and “My, my, my Delilah” of 1968. The team, give or take the odd bad result, were doing well and a treble looked there for the taking.
It would have been the first treble since Martin O’Neill in 2001, but Ronny was denied by some poor refereeing in the semi-final of the Scottish Cup against Inverness Caledonian Thistle. It was Celtic’s first real contact with Steven McLean and he made two decisions, one of them clearly wrong, the other debatable and draconian, which deprived Celtic of the Scottish Cup.
The first was a clear and undeniable hand ball in the penalty box (shown above) which would have put Celtic 2-0 up and seen Inverness reduced to ten men, and the other was when goalkeeper Craig Gordon was sent off to compel the luckless Lukasz Zaluska to come on to face a penalty kick. He had a poor game, possibly at fault for all three goals as Celtic went down. It was the start of Ronny’s bad luck in semi-finals and Inverness’s good luck continued in the final when they beat Falkirk in a game where Falkirk gave at least as good as they got.
And thus ended Deila’s first season in charge of Celtic. He won two domestic trophies out of three, regained a certain respectability in Europe after a dreadful start, and although attendances were down, no-one could have said that Celtic had a bad season, and Ronny could feel proud of himself. A team was developing, it was felt, and there seemed no reason why next season could not bring more of the same, especially as (the)Rangers would still not be in the Premier League as they went down in a play-off to Motherwell, watch that below.
Ronny’s second season as Celtic manager will be reviewed tomorrow morning on The Celtic Star.
David Potter
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I wish you would all get off this guys back.
Ronnie was a very good Celtic manager and coach. Success is measured in many different ways and he successfully prepared the ground for others. He was not fully supported by our pathetic board, but Ronnie forced Celtic to increase their fitness program and enabled many players to improve their skills. His tactics were good and his support for the players was excellent. Lennon does not compare to him in any way and Brendan benefited from his policies and worked to improve the. Lennon failed to do so.
IMHO Ronnie is always welcome back at Paradise and I am grateful for what he did.
………..worked to improve them. Oooops!