A tweet from Andy Murray this week took followers to a poignant account of the last days and hours of another of the finest of British-born sporting talents.

 

No comment accompanied it and it would be wrong to jump to conclusions, but one suspects some admiration was at play for a man whose career was over and health in desperate decline long before Murray was born.

Whether or not that is the case, the contrast between the lifestyles chosen by Northern Ireland's greatest ever sportsman and the man I consider to be his Scottish counterpart could not be more extreme. That seemed particularly topical in the context of Celtic manager Ronny Deila's comments on the impact of conditioning on his team's quest for improvement and trophies.

All the moreso in light of the photographic evidence of how the Scotland football captain spent a day off emerged just days before one of his club's biggest matches of the season.

In terms of how he looks after himself, it is self-evident that Scott Brown is no Andy Murray. Nor is he another George Best, of course, but handled differently, the situation could have proven very difficult for his manager, given the emphasis Deila had previously placed on how elite sportspeople should behave.

At the most fundamental level it is hard to interpret the consumption of alcohol and deep fried pizza, as was alleged, as anything other than flagrant disregard for the manager's values.

In his first season in the job Deila could, then, effectively have seen himself as confronted with deciding whether he might be seen as weak in failing to discipline an influential character, or might split the dressing room by taking action against his team's on-field leader.

Who knows what sort of discussions took place behind closed doors as Celtic maintained their public silence on the matter in the days that followed, but a first victory in the tournament in six years with Brown putting in an energetic shift made things decidedly easier.

Even so, it was vital that the right messages were issued thereafter and the handling of that was cleverly finessed. Deila may have expressed his philosophy very openly but team rules are another matter and so he was able to state that none had been broken, as such.

Yet the overall thrust of his post-match message spoke of a willingness to offer forgiveness for what Brown had done rather than acceptance of it, not least because the captain had redeemed himself in the way that he performed on the field of play.

He will hope that by speaking as he did he has strengthened what already looks a powerful bond between backroom and squad and, with players having lined up both to stand by their skipper but also to express their delight for the manager immediately after the game, he must have been further encouraged by Brown's subsequent admission of wrong-doing and pledge to try to behave better in future.

It all suggested that, like most effective modern managers of men and women, Deila has accepted that the best way to win hearts and minds is through understanding of the challenges that come with fundamental changes in outlook, rather than inflexible imposition of regulations.

However longer term it is vital for Celtic and for Scottish sport that the Deila diet becomes the norm as players learn to adopt his understanding that being what he calls a 24 hour athlete is essential to making the very best out of what ability they have, a message he reinforced this week when talking about how becoming collectively lighter has allowed them to play better.

Within that framework Brown, whose career has been interrupted by major injury problems, is clearly a phenomenal natural athlete, but he has never tested himself week-in, week-out in one of the world's top leagues and how good he might have been had he taken a different approach from an early age is unknowable.

Others in their squad, for the most part the British-born players, have evidently had the same difficulty in changing lifetime habits, to the extent that Deila may, medium term, use a nucleus of old-school British players for domestic competition, seeing little European action.

When it comes to culture change, however, as I wrote at the beginning of the season when Deila's emphasis on such matter was being scorned in some quarters with comparisons being made to failed Rangers manager Paul Le Guen I sincerely hope he wins the day.

There have been some signs that - not least thanks to the successes of the famously abstemious Murray and Chris Hoy - the sporting-inclined in our society at least have evolved a little since Le Guen's ill-fated Ibrox reign, while becoming the first foreign manager to win a treble will help substantially in terms of giving him additional leverage with future generations.

However in terms of the overhaul required to the sporting culture in this part of the world where boozing and bad eating is as ingrained in the culture as it is, Deila is effectively engaging in a form of neurosurgery in attempting to unravel the hard-wiring.

That being so it might have been fatal for his project to attempt to subject his team to a cardiac transplant at the same time, so in how he dealt with the component that provides its heartbeat he must be congratulated on his bedside manner.