DARREN JACKSON is 48 now, yet his eyes remain as bright and his grin as mischievous as when he peaked as a player in the summer of 1998: first helping Celtic to their first league title for a decade, then playing for Scotland against Brazil in the opening match of the World Cup. A cheeky wink to the camera as it panned along Scotland’s line-up at the Stade de France that day was intended for his daughter, but also accurately conveyed his personality to a global audience.
“I don’t like mentioning that and the boys know I don’t like talking about it,” he says loudly, as the young players sitting nearby in Dundee United’s canteen at St Andrews tuck into toast and scrambled eggs. More seriously, and more quietly, he actually doesn’t want to dwell on yesteryear. Not when there is plenty going on in the present.
United face Celtic this afternoon in a Scottish Cup quarter-final and in a week’s time they will meet them again in the League Cup final. Much as he remains fond of his former club, who cared for him when he was diagnosed with hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid inside the cranium that can lead to brain damage or death, in 1997, Jackson wants United to prove the stumbling block to their treble aspirations over the next week.
He is part of the trio of former Celtic players plotting to derail Ronny Deila’s side, having given up a productive career as an agent to work as a coach with Jackie McNamara, the manager, and Simon Donnelly, his assistant. Jackson once joked it was “good cop, good cop, bad cop”, with him in the latter role, but really his style is in keeping with McNamara’s method of treating the players with respect and receiving it in return. “I’ve mellowed a wee bit,” he says. “You get frustrated at times, but you try and approach it in the right way.”
That patient approach has survived a recent dip in form that suggests a serious case of distraction has set in before the season-defining jousts with Celtic. United have taken one point from their past 12 to falter in the Premiership and successive cup exits would add to the growing sense of anti-climax at Tannadice.
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Another theory is that they signed off for the season when they sold Stuart Armstrong and Gary Mackay-Steven, both cup-tied today, to Celtic on deadline day last month for a combined £2m, just 48 hours after their League Cup semi-final win over Aberdeen. It has been suggested on social media that McNamara was so disenchanted by those mid-season sales that he has come close to quitting. Not so, insists Jackson.
“He has a picture in mind. When boys leave, there are others that come through. We lost two fantastic players, but we also lost two fantastic players in the summer [Andy Robertson to Hull and Ryan Gauld to Sporting Lisbon], and we kept on coming. We move on.
“You roughly know what players [other] clubs are interested in, so you are bringing the next stage through and that will always happen and will need to happen at a club like this. You don’t just look at the short-term view of, ‘I’ve got a good team and I’ll deal with just now’. You have to deal with, if they leave, who is ready to come in. Jackie’s said many times that’s why he changes the team because you have to see if they can cope with it and there’s no doubt the kids can cope with it.”
The path that Armstrong and Mackay-Steven have taken is one that Jackson once trod, when he moved to Celtic Park from Hibs for £1.25m in 1997, and he argues all clubs have to accept their place in the transfer market’s foodchain. “It’s the structure of every club really because everyone needs to sell. At Celtic, if somebody comes in from the Premier League, then the players have gone. It happens. People say we’re a selling club, but everyone is a selling club. Manchester United got £80m for [Cristiano] Ronaldo when they sold him. Obviously, when it’s a higher scale, you can demand a bigger price, but if someone comes in with the right price for any player, then most clubs sell.”
His fondest memory of Celtic was winning the league and thereby stopping Rangers’ bid for 10 consecutive titles that season. The thing he learnt there was having the mentality to go out and win every week, regardless of how well you were playing, what was going on at home, how the pitch was, or a thousand other variables. “That’s the demands at the Old Firm, winning every single game, and that’s what the manager is trying to get going here. You’re not going to perform every week, but it’s grinding out results sometimes and you need to do that.”
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United can take encouragement from a 2-1 home win over Deila’s side on the Sunday before Christmas in which Armstrong scored, but will also be mindful of a 6-1 defeat at Celtic Park in August, when their defensive inadequacies were exposed, particularly at set plays. They remain a mercurial side, brilliant at their best and woeful at their worst, and we must wait to see which version emerges from the tunnel at Tannadice today.