At this point, it’s not just Wilfried Nancy’s Celtic team that’s a hard watch, it’s Nancy himself.
So many explanations and justifications, so many verbal contortions as he attempts to talk through his latest defeat. It’s become painful, quickly.
“I think I am in a good direction with the players,” he said after his fourth defeat in a row in his new job, a 2-1 loss at struggling Dundee United.
“Today you saw we had a good performance,” he stated. “We are improving,” he insisted. “We were close to winning… keep the faith.”
All around him now there are football atheists. There really can’t be many believers left. As Nancy spoke, it was hard to avoid wincing and wincing and wincing again.
As he made his way through his post-match assessment, the temptation was to shout, ‘Stop… stop talking… stop explaining because when you’re explaining, you’re losing, again’.
The bottom line in all of this is that between his nightmarish beginning with Celtic and his low-key ending with Columbus Crew, Nancy has won just three of his last 16 games as a manager.
The defeats by United, St Mirren, Roma and Hearts now joined the ones that went before in America – Cincinnati (twice), Chicago Fire, New York City and New England Revolution.
Nancy finished seventh in the regular season in MLS, won 14 of 34 games, ranking joint sixth in the league for goals scored and eighth for goals conceded. After being manager of the season the year before, it was all very blah.
His credentials for the Celtic job were, at best, thin, despite the excited rhetoric of some observers in America, who painted him as a special one and his capture as a coup.