Let’s play a game of Guess Who? From whose tongue do you think these words tripped? And as if that wasn’t enough whimsy to be packed into one column, can you guess when?
"I've got a huge respect for the people that work at this club - the board and the directors. They've created a very stable foundation, and I have to respect that.
"Of course, as a manager, I always want the club to be the very best it can be for the supporters, but I have to maybe understand where the limits are sometimes."
No prizes I’m afraid if you correctly identified that this is a quote from Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers. After all, it was only last week, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
Well, actually, no. In fact, Rodgers spoke these words almost exactly seven years ago, way back in 2018, as Celtic prepared to play the second leg of a Champions League playoff tie against AEK Athens. Which, incidentally, they lost.
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Not that you can really blame Rodgers for spinning the old hits. After all, he is the one who is forced to face up to the concerns of supporters and repeated questions from me and my media chums about why a club with such relatively staggering resource in Scottish terms seems determined to hoard the majority of it under the mattress.
If you’ve ever attended a Celtic AGM, one of the last impressions you may have of the grey suits seated at the top table is that they may have a penchant for thrill-seeking, but the club’s board seem determined to play Russian Roulette with their chances of reaching the promised land of the Champions League proper. Which, given their liking for having money in reserve and lots of it, makes their reluctance to speculate a little to accumulate a lot more curious still.
Ah, the board may retort, but we did spend last summer, breaking the club’s transfer record twice to bring in Adam Idah and Arne Engels, neither of whom are even guaranteed starters in the manager’s strongest XI. And that would be fair enough, to a point.
Except, for all the criticism that those players have received, both did play pivotal roles in Celtic reaching the knockout stages of Europe’s premier competition last season.
Idah’s two goals at Villa Park were a glimpse of the player he could be, and admittedly that he doesn’t show enough. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that he also was the one who forced the issue late on in the previous game against Young Boys, racing through and eventually seeing his shot ricochet into the net off Loris Benito to secure Celtic’s passage with a game to spare.
Engels is still young and is a work in progress, but his athleticism was a key component in Celtic holding their own at such a level. In fact, it could be argued that his display in the away leg of the first knockout round against Bayern Munich was his most impressive in a Celtic jersey to date, where he was key to Rodgers’ side coming within a whisker of pulling off an almighty shock.
If there was a lesson at all from that night in the Allianz Arena, it was that Celtic didn’t quite yet have the strength in depth to get over the line against Europe’s best, a point Rodgers alluded to in the immediate aftermath of the game.
Bayern made four subs that night, bringing Leroy Sane, Kingsley Coman, Thomas Muller and injury-time heartbreaker Alphonso Davies off the bench. Celtic, by stark contrast, made only two, bringing on – with the greatest of respect - Idah and Yang Hyunjun.
After such an impressive campaign, Rodgers is right to feel that he had earned a little more help from the club as he attempts to push them to that next level. Instead, having lost the goalscorer from that night in Munich, Nicolas Kuhn (with another £17m flowing into the club’s coffers, incidentally), they go into this qualifier against far less glamorous opposition weaker than they were on that evening, and inexplicably, with a hint of jeopardy around their progression.
Rodgers, and more importantly, the fans, deserve better. Particularly when those supporters are being asked to fork out £36 a head to attend the first leg of the tie this evening. It all just feeds into the narrative that the board is out of touch with supporters, and that they are more concerned with a healthy bottom line than putting out the best possible line-up.
Whatever the truth of that matter, by dilly-dallying with their business in every window, they anger the fans, do a disservice to their manager, and take the chance of disillusioning both to the point where they might lose them. There are still tickets available for the Almaty game at the time of writing, while Rodgers is now in the final year of his contract, with no hint of an extension on the horizon.
For a collection of men who seem so risk averse, they seem happy enough to dice with death when it comes to Celtic reaching the Champions League. If the nightmare scenario for the club comes to pass, there will be no prizes for guessing who will be taking the blame.
