Paradise long lost for Moyes as career hits rocks
HOW Celtic must adore being in love with a manager who loves them back. For a while last summer, it looked like they might end up with David Moyes. They have a guy, seemingly uninterested in advances from elsewhere, endeavouring to give them the heaven and the stars and offering the all-important issue of commitment.
No talk of slapping women from him. Instead, he is even taking his message of everlasting love to the punters over at Ibrox, a modernday Mahatma Gandhi in a padded jacket.
Brendan Rodgers, fresh from agreeing his new four-year contract, is a man filled up with how blissful life is. He even talks about his backroom staff, Chris Davies and Glen Driscoll, releasing ‘sighs of happiness every single day they are at Lennoxtown’.
The Celtic Park boardroom must have been witness to a few sighs, too. Of relief.
They got the right man at the end of last season. A good fit for what they are trying to do and, as it has turned out, a splendid ambassador. And they know it.
The fact that the final touches were being put to a lucrative new deal for Rodgers last week just as the car crash surrounding Moyes at Sunderland unfolded in all its horror must have brought that into even sharper focus.
If ever a week showed how an individual’s stock can rise and fall in football, it is the one just gone.
As Rodgers continues with the exciting project of building a club in his own image, Moyes is coming to terms with the rather different challenge of trying to repair what is left of his. What a far cry it is from the summer of 2013 when the Scot, a model of consistency at Everton, was handed a six-year deal and the keys to Old Trafford as the successor to Sir Alex Ferguson.
As United, now under the charge of Jose Mourinho, prepare to travel to the Stadium of Light this afternoon, Moyes looks more like The Broken One than The Chosen One.
He took over a tough situation at a poorly-run club in Sunderland last July, but he has done little to turn things round. Bottom of the table, relegation appears a fait
accompli. The narrative is that he is now a man out of time, stuck in his ways, lacking vision and inspiration.
Some of that is almost certainly unfair, but his habit of talking his team down, reducing expectation, hasn’t helped. That well-documented off-camera exchange with the BBC journalist Vicki Sparks might yet end up being the final nail in his coffin.
The threat to give Sparks a slap for asking an awkward question was dreadful. An appalling error of judgment. It cannot be written off as a badly-phrased joke and the Football Association are correct to demand an explanation.
No one would suggest, for a moment, that Moyes’ words should be taken literally. However, this
was behaviour intended to intimidate to some degree, the tactics of the old-school. And that is becoming part of Moyes’ problem.
Still just 53, he now finds himself being painted, rightly or wrongly, as a guy being left behind as football moves on. His wholly unexpected move to Real Sociedad after ten months at United should have helped address that, but it didn’t.
Moyes never bothered to gain a working knowledge of Spanish, hardly the most difficult language to pick up. The feeling in San Sebastian was that he never integrated with the culture, holing himself up in an expensive hotel on the seafront. He never really made the most of the experience.
When possibilities at Celtic opened up, with major shareholder Dermot Desmond giving the green light to unleash the chequebook, it seems he felt he was still too big for Celtic and Scottish football.
He didn’t see a sufficiently appealing opportunity. Rodgers, meanwhile, did. The Northern Irishman had worked at the highest level, too, almost winning the title with Liverpool, but saw the good in what Celtic were able to place on the table — potential access to the Champions League and the freedom to build a team, a style and a set-up in whichever way you desire.
It is a rare freedom in this day and age and one Rodgers certainly never enjoyed at Anfield. Is the likes of Sunderland really a better project to undertake than that?
For Rodgers, this interesting and most exacting challenge he now possesses in Glasgow clearly outweighs the obvious negatives of working in a domestic league crippled by a lack of revenue.
Rodgers comes across as a fellow aiming for the stars, though. He is upbeat and expressive. He enjoys the limelight. In many ways, a polar opposite to Moyes. And as in all spheres of public life, perception in football goes a long way.
The Celtic boss does not seem at all blinded by the lights of the English Premier League. It was Moyes’ be-all and end-all. Rather, who is to say that Rodgers will not head for somewhere like La Liga when this love affair at Celtic finally draws to a close?
He speaks Spanish. And it seems inevitable that he would throw himself into such an adventure wholeheartedly.
Who knows whether Moyes would have benefited from rebuilding his career at Celtic Park in the wake of his own time abroad? Life is full of these ‘Sliding Doors’ moments.
One thing seems sure, though. If you offered Celtic the opportunity to go back nine months and do it all again, the same man would be getting the job.