St Mirren character, St Mirren cleverness, St Mirren glory – all there in black and white and in fantastic technicolour too.
A triumph for the ages, a day to rank with any in their history. Deserved and, on the final whistle, delirious. Untrammelled, uninhibited joy.
In marching on towards a storied victory against all odds, St Mirren trampled Celtic underfoot. Out-thought them tactically. Out-fought them emotionally.
“Faith over fear” said their manager Stephen Robinson in the preamble. It might have sounded like a nice slogan then. Now, it sounds like something you might see on a tablet of stone.
This was the believers versus the non-believers, the mentally strong versus the mentally frail, the ones without fear grabbing the occasion by the throat versus a red-hot favourite who caved in when the heat was on.
When Jonah Ayunga and his marauding band of brothers feasted on Celtic’s desperate confusion and put them to sleep with two goals in a dozen second-half minutes, Hampden erupted.
There was time to play – time, in theory, for Celtic to fight back but it never looked likely. At half-time, Robinson recognised where Celtic’s danger was coming from and neutered it with his changes. So swift, so smart.
He said later that this should not have been possible, that the gigantic financial disparity between these clubs should have been unbreachable.
In a sense, he was absolutely right and in another sense, he was wrong. When you have the kind of spirit that St Mirren have, then you’ll always have a chance. When you have a manager like Robinson, who has put the hearts sideways in Celtic in three meetings in a row before this one, then you’ve always got hope.
Remains of O’Neill feelgood shredded on Hampden grass
And Celtic? This is a diminished team with an uncertain manager, a furious support and a haunted board.
At the end, you looked one way and you saw two-goal Ayunga – “amazing, man” – and his driven mates and then looked the other and there was Wilfried Nancy, miserable in the midst of his baptism of fire.
Three games, three defeats. Records are getting broken all the time in the early days of his regime. The little bit of feelgood this club restored in the brief time Martin O’Neill was in charge has been shredded into a million pieces, like the abandoned ticker-tape on the Hampden grass.
O’Neill just about managed to paper over the cracks of a club that has badly lost its way but all those fractures are so obvious now. With supporters engaged in a toxic stand-off with the board and the team having lost any sense of direction and confidence they once had, Nancy has walked into something he cannot have understood.
His team played strongly for the final half hour of the first half but they went out like a light after that. When Robinson’s immortals – yes, that’s what they have become – turned on the afterburners and sped away into the distance, Nancy had no reply.
His team were hit on the counter, his defence ripped apart, his hopes of asserting himself as a manager of substance cast to the wind. This was savage.
His hyperactivity for much of the day – leaping about his technical area and gesturing madly in the manner of a man at a rave – had gone. He was static now. Motionless for the most part. Resigned to his fate in the present and, perhaps, fearful for his position in the future.
Many doubtful eyes will be upon him as Celtic face Dundee United on Wednesday. There are questions here – as ludicrous as it seems, how many more games like this one does Nancy have before the Celtic hierarchy do something about it? What’s the tipping point?
There’s a bigger question, though. A more profound one. Nancy’s team may be making a mess of it on the pitch but what about the ones above him who, fans might say, have fallen asleep at the wheel?
In the best of times, Celtic’s communication with their support has been poor. Now, in the worst of times, do they retreat ever inwards to block out the flak? Where will that get them? Some humility is called for. Fans will not be holding their breath.
The club is going backwards on so many fronts. From going toe to toe with Bayern Munich earlier in the year to this? It’s a stunning drop-off.
Their wont is to blame sections of fans for causing ructions, for not being grateful enough for what they have. Some hardline supporters stand accused of really poor behaviour but the masses have nothing to do with any of that. They, too, seem furious at where the club is at and where it might be heading. Relations haven’t been as bad since the 1990s.
‘Nancy not the whole problem at Celtic’
The board’s apparent belief that nothing is as bad as it seems and that fans need to understand how lucky they are gets them nowhere – only further ensconced in their own echo chamber.
Paul Tisdale, the self-styled football doctor, is a powerful man at the club, the operator who helped bring Nancy to Glasgow. Tisdale is a footballing Trappist monk. If he has a vision, a way out of the morass, wouldn’t it be an idea for him to articulate it?
After the cup final, Nancy said he knows where “we want to go”. He also said: “I try to go beyond results.” By that, maybe, he meant he wants to not just win but win with style. After losing three games in a row the jam tomorrow line was a little misplaced. It came with a shuddering reminder of the kind of things that Russell Martin used to say when he was manager of Rangers.
Nancy is not the whole problem at Celtic, far from it. But he’s a symptom of it, a failing cog in a malfunctioning machine. One of their trophies from last season has now been taken from them and no sane voice could mount any sort of case against St Mirren being thoroughly deserving of their glory.
Another of their trophies, the Premiership title, is in danger in the face of a challenge from a club, Hearts, with cohesion and clarity, run by a manager who knows his stuff and a set of players who are organised and focused.
Source : https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c0mpk7l3zzro
