Sitting on the shores of Lake Thun south of Berne, its quaint houses clinging to the steep slopes leading away from a lovely little harbour, Spiez is the sort of place where a man can do his thinking amid breathtaking natural scenery. The mountains rise sharply from here to some of the highest in the world, the famous Eiger and Jungfrau peaks are swathed in clouds a short journey to the southeast. It is the beautiful basecamp for Celtic's climb into the new season, which will also feature matches in England and the United States, and it is inevitable that some who set out with them here will fall by the wayside as it unfolds. Gordon Strachan has more options now than he has perhaps had at any other stage in his managerial career and will be assessing them keenly over the next month before the defence of the Premier League begins.
The homely Hotel Belvedere plays host to Celtic and the manager smiles as he sits down to talk after receiving a text from his grandson which reports the first Strachan triumph of the season, in an egg and spoon race. He may have been pushed harder than Celtic were over the course of the Premierleague last year, which is not to demean their own consistency but merely to note the challenge was feeble. Celtic also seem to be leading the way over the summer, gathering fresh players with greater ease than Rangers have been able to. Strachan can even walk free of pain at training after a hip operation, yet an Old Firm manager is suspicious of such serenity and, sure enough, he is hit by something he should have seen coming. A stray pass from Bobo Balde.
He relishes this time with his players before the demands of a season start to eat into his coaching time. "It [preseason] is getting shorter and shorter, so you've got to cram in all the information you want to pass to the players plus getting them fit at the same time," he says between the sessions. "You have to try and merge coaching with some stamina work and we have come up with some decent ideas on how to do it." The previous evening in Grenchen, an hour or so to the north of Spiez, Strachan got his first look at his new squad in a game against an old foe. Christian Gross's Basel are not the force they were when they knocked Celtic out of the Champions League five years ago, and set them on the road to Seville, but provide a decent early test which Celtic pass after Kenny Miller finishes adeptly to score the only goal.
Massimo Donati looks stronger on the pitch than he did at his signing conference, cleverly shielding the ball away from challenges and springing attacks with passes stabbed through midfield. Strachan hopes he will live up to the glowing reference given by Leonardo. The former Brazilian international is now a Milan director, and Strachan got to know him when they worked as analysts for the BBC. A splendidly-timed recovery tackle, as Basel threaten to score, suggests Donati has the inbred Italian sense of danger. He gives way to Scott Brown, who is full of surging dynamism. Their contrasting gifts hint at a promising partnership in central midfield.
They are Strachan's two major signings of the summer, yet other candidates crowd into his mind and he this area, Mark Wilson moves seam lessly from attacking right-back to diligent and intelligent midfield sitter ithe second half. Strachan notes thiwith a glow of pleasure, but admits his short of full-backs and has nogiven up hope of acquiring Jean-Joe Perrier-Doumbe, the Cameroon international who scored Celtic's winner ithe Scottish Cup final while on loan from Rennes, despite competition from France and the Premiership. Celtic attack through their full-backs and Perrier-Doumbe fits this profile perfectly. In contrast, Adam Virgo and Stephen McManus look cumbersome when asked to fill these roles in the second half against Basel. Virgo may go on loan, Strachan says he will talk to Mark McGhee about this when he gets home, literally because the new Motherwell manager is staying with him just now. McManus, meanwhile, will return to his natural habitat of cen- tre-back, and Strachan needs to pick a permanent partner for him from Balde, Gary Caldwell, Darren O'Dea, currently out with a hamstring strain, John Kennedy, who played solidly against Basel, and Steven Pressley.
Advertisement
McManus is also likely to be Celtic's new captain. "We were talking about it the other day and somebody said he was only young and I-said, 'No, no to play in this team you have to be a man as soon as you put a jersey on'. He's a mature character." Strachan needs to confirm this because he likes a closer relationship with his captain than many other managers. They are his interface with the dressing room, conveying concerns on behalf of the other players, but also being drawn into Strachan's confidence and getting a glimpse of his long-term strategy for Celtic. "It's big. You have to be close to your captain. You have to trust him and he has to trust you. He has to be privy to your thoughts, when other players can't."
The most interesting thoughts surely relate to how much further Strachan can take Celtic and therefore how long he should stay with them. In two seasons he has won successive titles, both domestic cups and taken the club into the last 16 of the Champions League, where they performed honourably against Milan, the even-tual winners. After staying too long at Coventry, Strachan cut short his own reign at Southampton to take a break and wrote in his autobiography that the "usual managerial cycle at most clubs is three years". On Friday, he clarified this comment saying it applied to Premiership also-rans rather than its top five or clubs of Celtic's stature, yet remained slightly cryptic. "It's different here, you can do something different here. I said at the management course for the A-licence that there's a kind of a three-year cycle and people like Graeme Souness and Reidy [Peter Reid] have agreed. Unless you are at the top four or five, where you can really get a dynasty going, then it's really hard work after three years to keep it going. It's been proven that you can get a dynasty going at Celtic, but whether I do it or not I am not sure."
Celtic went stale towards the end of last season and the manager will look for signs of this persisting, although he is confident that it can chiefly be explained by a loss of competitive edge after their exit from Europe left them only to protect their lead in the Premier League. "It's very hard to ask competitive people to keep competing when it is not competitive," he says, "but I am not going to be relying on that returning. I am going to work to make them fitter, more intelligent."
He will certainly expect a greater contribution of goals from his strikers but has turned, potentially, a £1m profit on the transfers of Craig Beattie to West Brom and Scott McDonald from Motherwell. Celtic's nemesis in the 2005 title race played alongside Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink in the second half last Thursday and there were signs of a partnership in embryo. Scott Chipperfield, Basel's Australia midfielder, noted that McDonald is hard to separate from the ball as well as being a natural goalscorer. He contributed 15 league goals for Motherwell last season, more than Beattie, Miller, and Maciej Zurawski managed between them beside Vennegoor of Hesselink, who found the net nine times in the SPL during a season curtailed by injury. Chris Killen is likely to deputise in the Dutchman's absence this term but is still feeling the after-effects of his Achilles tendon injury. Strachan's Celtic continue to evolve, but as the manager looked up at the mountains encircling Spiez he may have wondered if they have already peaked under him. The season ahead will give him his answer.