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Scotland on Sunday 25/04/1999
By Jock Brown
Black humiliated by coach's dismissive reply
IT seemed to me essential for the head coach to relate readily to all the coaches on the staff and to acquaint himself with the young players who were aspiring to first-team football.
This was not an area which appeared to generate much interest from Wim. I can safely say that this was a major disappointment to the development coaches within the club, who had looked forward to having the opportunity to learn from someone they hoped proved to be a Dutch master.
To see them shunned so blatantly by Wim and Murdo MacLeod was a matter of great sadness to me, but much more so to them. Quite apart from the obvious disappointment of apparently not being worthy of routine communication from the top man, they found themselves working in something of a vacuum, constantly feeling tacit intensive disapproval from the head coach without any substance being communicated.
Disappointment felt by excellent men like Willie McStay, Kenny McDowall and Tom O'Neill was obvious. They found themselves in substantial difficulty when people outside the club asked them what they had learned from Wim Jansen. Loyalty frequently led them to give fudged responses as though attempting to retain the privacy of the information gleaned, but the reality was that they had felt totally unwelcome.
Only the tight cabal of those involved with the first team appeared to be given the time of day by Wim. These included Brian Scott, conditioning instructor Jim Hendry, masseur Graham Quinn, Danny McGrain and Peter Latchford and, of course, David Hay and Murdo. Even the backroom staff's Christmas night out, in 1997 excluded the rest of the coaching staff who did not receive an invitation. When the development staff had their night out, invitations to Wim's set were declined, with the creditable exceptions of Danny McGrain and Peter Latchford.
Shortly before Christmas that year the directors had a meeting with those heading the technical side of the club to obtain a briefing and learn about plans for development of the footballing side of the operation. It was agreed that Eric Black would present details of his proposals to strengthen the development side of the club.
Eric prepared a presentation document outlining his plans and distributed these among all those attending the meeting before addressing everyone by taking them through his proposals and answering questions. The presentation was impressive, including such details as the appointment of a new education officer, the former player John Cushley, and a host of other initiatives which he had created with the help of Willie McStay and the rest of the development team.
There was then a lively discussion around the table and eventually Jansen was asked for his observations. "I must have about 15 of these documents at home," he said.
The tone of the whole meeting was instantly changed. People clearly felt uncomfortable. Eric Black was embarrassed. Everyone realised how dismissive and unkind the comment was. There was also nothing constructive about the observation and in fact no comment was ever obtained about the paper itself which amounted to a substantial amount of work on the part of Eric Black.
The following day Eric approached Wim and said that he was interested to note that he had 15 such documents in his possession and wondered if he would be kind enough to let him have a look at them to see what he could learn. Wim had to confess that he didn't actually have any such documents, although he had seen a number of them in the past.
By this time it had become clearly-established chat there was to be no cross-fertilisation of any kind between the first-team squad and the other players at the club.
Training schedules had to be set up so that reserves and youths did not interfere with first-team activities and no youth players were integrated into the first-team set-up as a reward for good performances or to provide experience – that there appeared to be no need to involve him in consideration of teenage players who were certainly not instant first-team material.
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It was clear that the kind of unity which I was targeting was unlikely to be achievable within the prevailing regime. This was a major disappointment. My vision for the future of Celtic was a hierarchy of coaches with Wim Jansen at the top and people below him who would be capable, in due course, of succeeding him. My hope was that Wim would see out his three-year contract, perhaps extend it, but in due course be succeeded by someone already on the club's coaching staff. My initial thought way back in June 1997 was that the likely candidate was Murdo MacLeod. Further down the line, bearing in mind the approval obtained from Wim and Murdo to bring in Eric Black to lead development, it could be possible that Eric or Willie McStay could be Celtic head coaches at some point in the years ahead. That dream was crumbling on the surly and largely uncommunicative Wim Jansen, aided by the man whose industry and integrity, in my opinion, did not appear to match his ambition, Murdo MacLeod.