The Ronny Deila Story – Celtic’s Bizarre Two Seasons under the Norwegian Manager

An awful lot of water has flowed under the bridge since Ronny Deila was the Manager of Celtic. We now have perhaps the opportunity, having in the meantime seen the very good and the very bad, to analyse Ronny in some sort of historical perspective.

He was the Manager for two seasons 2014/15 and 2015/16. During that time, he won three Scottish trophies out of six – two Premier League titles and one Scottish League Cup, and in the other competitions, he reached the semi-final stage. Semi-final defeats are always hard to take, but one could argue that as one of them went as far as a penalty shoot-out and two others saw Celtic on the wrong end of draconian refereeing decisions at vital stages of the game which swung the balance, we are entitled to say “hard luck”.

Of his two seasons, it is generally accepted that 2014/15 was a great deal better than 2015/16 – yet on both occasions, Celtic ended up the champions of Scotland. And then he was sacked

Ronny’s record in Europe varied from the disappointing to the shocking. There were one or two games that were acceptable, and one that was a brilliant game of football between Celtic and Inter Milan reminding supporters of both teams of better days, but there were also some real shockers against opposition that could best be classed as moderate. Ronny also has the unwelcome distinction of having been beaten TWICE in the Champions League qualifying stages after the first team to beat Celtic were disqualified on a technicality!

Before Ronny arrived however, Celtic were in a strange position. They had won the Scottish League in 2014 (but also inflicted some really sub-standard performances on their supporters in the domestic Cup competitions) and Manager Neil Lennon suddenly left, it still being uncertain whether he jumped or was pushed. No real explanation was ever forthcoming, but the general perception, rightly or wrongly, was a dispute about the budget with the belief that Mr Lawwell and the Board were reluctant to sanction “marquee signings”.

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Be that as it may, Ronny arrived from nowhere – well from Stromgodset in Norway actually in summer 2014, as well known to Celtic fans as Wim Jansen and Jo Venglos had been when they came some years earlier, or indeed as familiar as Ange Postecoglou would be in 2021. The usual suspects for the job of Celtic Manager had been touted around in the Press with all sorts of journalists prepared to make a fool of themselves by stating categorically that “a source near the club told me late last night…” but it was the totally unknown Ronny Deila.

In this respect at least the Board deserved credit. Far too often in the past, the media had told clubs who their next Manager was going to be. They had certainly told the gullible Rangers Board a few years previously to appoint Paul le Guen…and to their cost, they had done so when the man obviously had little clue about the English language let alone the complexities or nuances of Scottish football.

But Ronny Deila it was and what a strange Scotland appeared to greet him with Celtic’s Premier League opponents being Aberdeen, Inverness Caledonian Thistle, St Johnstone, Dundee, Dundee United, Ross County, Kilmarnock, Motherwell, Hamilton, Partick Thistle and St Mirren. The obvious omissions were still floundering in the lower reaches, and there was also no-one from Edinburgh to worry about, the Capital being once again at a footballing low ebb.

But Edinburgh would see Celtic playing European football! The Commonwealth Games in 2014 were being held at, among other places, Celtic Park and that included a visit from, of all people, the Queen! Whatever the nuances and ironies of that situation – and how it hurt at Ibrox! – Celtic played a couple of Champions League games at Murrayfield, the home of Scottish rugby, beating Reykjavik but playing absolutely abysmally to lose to Legia Warsaw in a couple of games, home and away, where it was extremely difficult to find anything good to say about anyone’s performance – and it was already clear that Ronny Deila had a major job to do.

But then fate intervened. On a technicality, Celtic were awarded a 3-0 win in the Murrayfield game because the Poles had fielded an illegal player! As the first game in Poland had been 4-1, this meant that Celtic won the tie on away goals. One would have to say that this was fortuitous, to put it mildly, but then Celtic decided once again to infuriate their supporters by blowing up against a third rate Slovenian team called Maribor.

The 1-1 draw in Slovenia was acceptable, but the 0-1 defeat at Parkhead was one of the worst European experiences that we could remember, with all the traditional Celtic European failings of missing chances, and then being punished for it.

This game, coming between a defeat at Inverness and then a miserable draw at Dundee, made one wonder, but it was far too early in Deila’s career for the knives to be out. In any case there were some good results as well with Stefan Johansen, who had joined the club in the January transfer window of 2014 looking particularly impressive, and an on-loan player called John Guidetti who seemed to be leased out to many clubs on a season-to-season basis beginning to score goals. On the other hand, there were a few dismal flops as well.

In the Europa League, Celtic actually managed to qualify from a section containing Red Bull Salzburg, Astra Giurgiu and Dinamo Zagreb. The football was unimpressive, the three home games were played in front of a half-empty stadium, but Celtic won two, drew two and lost two, which was enough to qualify them, so that Ronny Deila could claim that he had achieved something that not all his predecessors could – namely that he would be playing in Europe after the New Year.

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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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