Celtic’s Twelfth Manager – John Barnes, lost the dressing room

From an early stage criticisms were made of his team formation and his team selection, but fate dealt him a bad blow in Lyon in October when Henrik Larsson broke his leg. The misfortune was twofold. One was the loss a great player, but the other was the loss of a stable influence which could have counteracted the crazy things that happened in the Celtic dressing room on that fateful night in February.

Even before the Inverness game, storm clouds were gathering. The first game back after the midseason break was against Kilmarnock at Rugby Park and it was an appalling bore, then the Saturday before Inverness game saw a game against Hearts thrown away.

The players took the field against Inverness with a mixture of arrogance about their lower League opponents, and opposition to their Manager. He had probably “lost the dressing room” long before, and his feet barely touched the ground on the way out after that humiliation which I hope, affected him in the same way as it affected us.

As Rudyard Kipling once said about the Boer War “it was no end of a lesson, but it will do us no end of good”.