A SCOTTISH remake of the movie Being John Malkovich, with Scott Brown as the eponymous figure whose mind could be accessed via a hidden portal, would be quite something indeed. Just what goes through the Celtic and Scotland captain’s head at any time is really anyone’s guess.

Brown is a complex figure, and one who has already endured more than his fair share of personal trauma, but it is not a side of him he willingly shows too often to the outside world. Ask Brown a question, whether probing or innocuous, and there is a 50:50 chance he will answer flippantly, and often in a self-deprecating manner. A gentle enquiry, for example, about whether his injury problems were now behind him was met in typical fashion: “Aye, but I’m always chocolate, aren’t I?”

It is not an attitude that infuriates his manager. Quite the opposite in fact. On the surface there would seem to be little in common between Ronny Deila – an erudite, well-educated Norwegian – and Brown with his daft boy fae Fife persona, but theirs is a partnership that has grown and developed over their 15 months or so together. After all, if there is anyone who understands the pressures that come with being Celtic captain, of having your every move scrutinised both on and off the field, it is the man who describes Brown as his “right hand on the pitch”.

Even the incident that showed Brown in the poorest light – the player slumped on an Edinburgh pavement, half cut and munching on a pizza – has been tolerated by Deila, a man usually ferociously strident when it comes to matters of fitness and wellbeing.

There are few athletes in the world, the Norwegian mused, placed under the sort of physical and mental demands that professional footballers face in the modern era. So if Brown feels the need to blow off a bit of steam now and again, he is within his rights to, although next time he should make it champagne not beer “because it keeps him lean”.

“That night was not so bad,” adds the manager. “I said to the players that he hasn’t done anything wrong because we had the day off afterwards but he has ruined our reputation. He was sorry but Scott Brown doesn’t get a vacation. If you count how many weeks there are when he doesn’t play three times in a week between now and Christmas, you will count maybe two weeks and that’s the last two in December.

“So that was one week when he wanted to be with his friends, and he was home for 10.30pm. Yes, he was drunk. But he needed that because he hadn’t done it for a long time and he knew he was coming to work on Friday to give 100%. In a perfect world he shouldn’t have done it but tell me one athlete who doesn’t do any drinking . . . who isn’t having one, two or three parties during a year? It’s not easy to live in that bubble here where everybody is watching you. Broony is a good person but he’s not perfect and he does these things. Nobody is perfect – who wants to live perfectly?

“We are talking about skiers in Norway or athletes or boxers – how many competitions do they have during a year? Maybe 15 weekends. Every three days for 11 months like a footballer? Good luck with 70 matches. I would love to see them doing that. They say they train so much, we can’t do that. We have to recover all the time and that’s only physically. Celtic have to win every game. Every time we lose, it’s a crisis. This pressure people have to feel in their bodies before they can say something about it. No individual athlete has that pressure all the time.”

Deila also believes there is a lot more to Brown than the face he shows to the rest of the world. “He’s an intelligent boy. That other stuff is just an image sometimes. But it is also good to be self-deprecating about things. That’s very important when you live with this pressure every day, to have a laugh. That makes the group better, too.

“Last year it was very, very hard to ever leave him out the team. This year it is hard as well but we have played without him a few times and played some good games. That’s not because Broony has been any worse but because the others have been better. That makes me comfortable as well, knowing that we can play games without him and not everything is reliant on him as that is not fair on him. He needs other players to take responsibility too.”

That Brown is now doing his coaching badges is very important, adds Deila. “I need here at Celtic a culture of reflection. Yes, we want to win but we have to learn from every experience because if you do not reflect on what you are doing you will stand still. But if you are going to evolve and get better you have to reflect. If players are doing coaching then they are reflecting.”