Last night, Brendan Rodgers and his team reached the final qualifier for this years Champions League groups. All the credit belongs to the manager and to the players who did this. All of it. Every shred, except that which accrues to the fans automatically, for filling the ground and for making it another great Champions League night.
No credit belongs elsewhere. Not one bit.
Had last night not ended in Celtic going through, I would have started today with an article very different in tone, but Brendan would not have shouldered the blame. This is last year’s team, with all that entails, minus some key players due to injury. You could argue that his squad of players going into this two legged tie was, as a consequence of this series of injuries, weaker than the team under Ronny Deila which exited the Champions Cup last season.
I know who I blame for that, and Brendan Rodgers has been scandalously hamstrung.
The people above him failed him when it came to giving him adequate resources to get through this tie. If not for his skills as a manager we would have gone out last night, to Astana, to a team most of us wouldn’t have seen on the road five years ago.
Result notwithstanding, the board’s own lack of accomplishment is impossible to ignore. If you do so you make the job of the manager harder. The people above him are shirking their responsibilities to prepare him as best they can. They are failing all of us, but Brendan is the guy who will feel that most acutely and the guy who has to deal with the consequences.
In my view, you cannot support a board that fails to back the manager and then claim to be backing the manager yourself. The two just don’t fit together. If you support them then you support the way they are treating him. If you’re trying to tell me he’s been backed up until now you’re only kidding yourself on, because that’s transparently not the case. He has identified players. He knows which areas of the team need strengthening.
His pleas have been utterly ignored up until now, save for the signing of Kolo Toure on a free.
Note that I have no issues with that signing; he is a class act.
But the simple fact is that he cost the club not one penny in transfer fees, which means that for all the financial input the fans made during the close season our transfer spend thus far, to prepare us for the Champions League and to give a top boss the players he needs, is under £1 million.
That is pathetic, and insulting to all of us and to Brendan in particular. If we go out in the next round without having added at least two quality footballers to this squad we’ll have pissed away somewhere in the region of £15 million plus to save a fraction of that.
Because that’s what we’re talking about here, after all. Take Sinclair for example. The difference between what we’ve offered and what Villa want is a mere £2.5 million, and I’m not even suggesting we meet their valuation. But somewhere between our offer and their public figure is a number they can live with and it’s ridiculous that a club our size can’t hit that mark and give the manager one of the players he thinks will drive this team forward. Are we really going to piss about when this could be settled by upping the offer a little? Perhaps by what we paid, last season, for Scott Allan, on a whim it seems to me, a player the manager didn’t even want.
For the sake of an extra £500,000 we gambled with our Champions League future. There’s nothing smart about that. Nothing positive about it. “Oh look, we saved half a million pounds …” bravo, but that’s the attitude that cost us these last two years and so in fact, what we actually did was kissed off a colossal eight figure sum instead.
And still I get told, constantly, what a superlative “businessman” Peter Lawwell is.
Even if it were true – and it’s not; he’s a bog-standard CEO, easily replaced – his job is to support the football club. Instead he’s turned it into a cash cow for supporting the profitability of the “business.” He’s asset stripped it to guarantee his own bonus; I don’t care how many of his defenders talk about how he’s a supporter “just like us.” Do you have a heated driveway, paid for by the club? The simple truth is that he’s far better compensated here than he would be anywhere else and he knows it. He’s never going to get a gig this good again in his life, certainly not at Arsenal or any of the other clubs he’s claimed have tried to poach him over the years.
If they did, he didn’t stay here out of loyalty or affection. Even leaving aside the money, he stays because if he went anywhere else he’d be out of the limelight, on a performance related bonus scheme that was about achievements on the park and he wouldn’t be allowed, for one second, to interfere in team matters which shouldn’t be in the purview of a football club CEO.
If the board wants a director of football, create the damned post and give it to him, if a manager anywhere is willing to work under that structure with him at the helm. But this despicable fraud of pretending he’s just another CEO who is there to “support” the boss … it’s time that charade was called out for what it is.
The people running Celtic have until Monday to bring players in; that’s the deadline. Anything less will be a further abrogation of their responsibilities to the manager, and whether he succeeds in getting us through to the Group Stages or not, that’s the point where even their most vocal supporters should draw a line. This isn’t a second-tier boss to be messed about and forced to work with dreck. Brendan Rodgers came out of the top drawer and not supporting him is the same as not bothering to appoint him in the first place because there’s no way in the world we’ll be able to keep him here if he has to work under those kind of restrictions.
You know, there are people who accuse me of finding any excuse to have a pop at this board of directors. It’s not true. I’ve held my tongue over their continuing silence on Resolution 12, and been more or less moderate in my tone in relation to their failure to lead Scottish football reform. I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt on the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, when I was being told repeatedly that they were colluding with the police and the authorities against their own fans and I’ve given them their due when they’ve negotiated sponsorship deals and such like. I’ve even credited Lawwell himself for those. When he does the job as it is on the job description he performs better than many others would.
But the playing squad is what it’s all about. Keeping the team winning on the park and taking us forward as a club … that stuff is sacrosanct. When they get their act together – if they ever do – and start laying down a marker for the future, showing ambition and resolve, then they’ll have what other people give them for free; full support.
But that support doesn’t come unqualified.
It has to be earned, as does respect, and I have none of that for people hanging their manager out to dry.
We don’t owe these people anything. They hold positions of responsibility, not authority. They don’t own our club, they are merely custodians of it and right now they are abysmally failing in their most profound duty of all, to support the most important man at the club.
The one in the dugout.
They have until Monday.
In Brendan We Trust.
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