Scott Brown last night delivered a damning assessment of the Ronny Deila reign when he revealed training had been “slow and not hard enough” under the Norwegian.

The Parkhead captain gave his former manager both barrels and pointed the finger of blame at the old regime for Celtic’s lacklustre form last season.

And he hailed Deila’s successor Brendan Rodgers for transforming the team’s training methods and breathing new life into the club.

Read more: Remember Scott Brown the all-action goal-scoring midfielder? Guess what, he's back.Glasgow Times:

Brown said:  “I think it all starts going into training. The training has been great, as have the physios and coaches.

“It wasn’t always like that last year. It didn’t always put a smile on your face when going into training. It was difficult, it was slow, the training itself wasn’t hard enough. 

“This season, all the lads are enjoying it, they want to work hard. The gaffer has got the right team in there. He wants us to work hard; we want to work hard for him on and off the park.

Read more: Remember Scott Brown the all-action goal-scoring midfielder? Guess what, he's back.

“Last season was frustrating, especially at home games when we were grinding out 1-0 results.

“There were too many 0-0 draws here and there, and what we want now is to make Celtic Park a fortress again over the next few seasons.

“And we now have the manager to do that.

“We have a great squad and this is a great place to be right now. We want to keep that going as long as we can and as long as training is interesting, and there are lot of variations and changes that the gaffer has implemented, then everything will be and is spot on.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday; training has been exceptional. I get on really well with the manager. We speak a lot, but it’s not just him. The coaching staff have been fantastic as well.”

Brown is playing some of the best football of his career and was man of the match and scored the only goal of the game against Dundee at Den Park on Saturday to retain an unbeaten domestic record. 

And Rodgers admitted after the win that Brown had turned out to be a far better player than he had thought him capable of being from having watched him in previous years.

And the fact the 31-year-old now has a break during the international matches is only going to help his continued fitness.

Brown was making plenty of positive noises in pre-season about what this Celtic team could be, but even he has been surprised at how many boxes have been ticked since July.

The captain said: “It has gone better than I thought it would. The main thing for us was to get into the Champions League, which we did.

Read more: Remember Scott Brown the all-action goal-scoring midfielder? Guess what, he's back.

“We got a good result against Manchester City, we went to Dundee which has never been easy place for us in the part, and while they fought for everything, we won and also kept a clean sheet.

“So it’s going really well and now we have to get better and carry on as we have been doing.”