AS everybody knows, the first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. Thankfully, Ronny Deila doesn’t appear to adhere to such regulations.

The Norwegian went into full, gory detail about the Lennoxtown training ground incident between Emilio Izaguirre and Nadir Ciftci yesterday which led to the Honduran having stitches inserted into a wound in his ear. While it was stretching things to say he is happy with his players knocking seven bells out of each other on a regular basis you could say he is quite relaxed about Celtic becoming something of a fight club. Ahead of today’s visit to Hears in the League Cup, one of their most awkward venues, at the very least it proves there is still life about the place.

The incident, of course, arrived hot on the heels of Kris Commons venting his fury at the Norwegian and his backroom staff in Molde and Leigh Griffiths and Dedryck Boyata well nigh coming to blows on the same trip, but Deila is a believer in what he calls ‘confrontation culture’ and went further than ever before to explain exactly what he means. Not since Karl Marx has there been a manifesto with such an emphasis in creating order out of conflict. You might call it Deila’s dialectics.

Under the coaching orthodoxy of old school managers such as Sir Alex Ferguson, the feet of Kris Commons may not have touched the ground after a strop like the one which took place when he was substituted in Norway. While some would see it as a sign of weakness that the player should promptly return to the fray after an apology, Deila says he isn’t afraid of confrontation so long as deep down the players in question know that he “loves them” and has their best interests at heart. With the likes of Leigh Griffiths, Scott Brown and Commons himself have all kept producing their best form regardless of their past misdemeanours, there may be a method in his madness.

“At the beginning I was a little bit afraid of confrontations, thinking 'oh how are we going to handle it?'” said Deila. “I didn't know how to do it. I know that you can act very tough but after you have finished your confrontation you have lost yourself.

“If I have a go at you, and say you have to do this and this, and you go away disappointed but I feel I am the boss, I have lost, because I have lost trust," he added. "But if you handle these things, listen to the other, get your views across, and decide this is what we are agreeing then you build trust. How you handle confrontation is very important for how you build trust for the future.”

The Norwegian accepts that he was something of an unlikely rabble rouser himself as a player. “I never actually fought on a training-ground,” he said. "But yes, I got angry and I was very hard to manage as a player because I thought I was the coach myself. I always say what I mean in a room and in the media and it brought me a lot of difficult situations to handle. But if I didn’t try these then I would never have got better. I did things that I will never do now with experience.

“I don't know what others would do [about the Commons situation],” he said. “I handle this situation the way I believe in and what is important is that everybody makes mistakes. You are dealing with players from 16 to 35 and everybody makes mistakes, just look at your own lives when you were that age.

“If you kill them every time they make a mistake, how can they develop? You have to see the consequences but also they have to see that we trust them and then we start all over again. You can make mistakes but you can't make the same mistakes over and over again.

“The one thing everyone has to know is that you can do everything you want with a player or as a person, as long as you love them. At the bottom of every conflict you have to really wish the other person well. If they feel that you hate them, they think that you are after them, then there is great distance.”

How much distance there is between Celtic and a Hearts side who are on the back of a five-match unbeaten run, including a league visit to Parkhead, will be instructive to witness. Deila knows this is a venue where his players must get their sleeves rolled up, much as they did last November when they won 4-0 at that venue in the Scottish Cup. It is the first instalment of three matches in nine days, which also includes the challenge of rivals Aberdeen in the league on Saturday before Molde again in the Europa League next Thursday. Deila admits he will tailor his team selection tonight to ensure that he has sufficient resources to meet each challenge.

“The first thing I said to players when I came here was that we train as we play," he said. "Of course we protect each other but we need to train at the intensity we have in games. When you have so many good players, as we have here, the intensity is sometimes better in training than it is in games because the ‘opponents’ here can be better than the ones you face in games. But when you are on the line all the time sometimes you go a little bit over it.”