It was illuminating to listen, today, to Kieran Tierney talking about how Brendan Rodgers has been such a big influence on his career. This young man broke into the team under Ronny Deila, and it would be crazy to overlook that, and disrespectful to our former boss, but he has flourished during the current campaign, he really has.
There is always a focus, in the media, on managers who have achieved great success. Sevconuts are clinging to the hope that their new manager knows how to spot a player; I would rather a Celtic manager knew how to develop talent than go out and buy it. This is a peculiarly modern fixation this, the boss who manages by splashing the cash, and it’s ironic that it’s come about at a time when the football season has two distinct “transfer windows.”
I am sure there have always been managers whose answer to every problem was to spend money, but it seems more prevalent now than it was before. Whatever happened to working with those already in the team, to get them to their full potential?
Good managers are talent spotters; of course they are.
But as a famous talent spotter once said when asked if he had a hard job “it’s the easiest in the world actually, because talent is obvious.”
I wrote today about how Sevco hopes bringing in a director of football from England will help them, but the problem is that the guys they have gone for are people used to working with big budgets. When you have a big budget you can go after those guys whose talent is obvious. Otherwise you’re taking pot-shots in the dark.
So much of football operates on that basis right now; with guys taking punts. Celtic’s signing policy once looked as if it was based on the same. How many of our managers of recent years have signed players who you only had to watch a couple of times to be frankly put off? Those guys, I don’t know why many of them were signed in the first place.
And yet … and yet … and yet …
As an aspiring author, I’ve read nearly every good book about writing ever written and I still find the best to be the one Stephen King wrote, entitled simply Writing: A Memoir of The Craft. In that book he concentrates quite a bit on style. He firmly believes – and I agree with him – that it’s possible to make a good writer out of a mediocre one by teaching the basics. But King is right about the fundamental of talent; you can’t make a bad writer into a good one or a good one into a great one. As he says, it’s fortunate for a lot of writers that this is a profession in which it’s possible to make a living being absolutely awful … our sports hacks prove it.
(Fiction writing, which is what the book is about, and what I ultimately want to do, is a different beast entirely, but there are bad writers who make a living doing that too, men and women who haven’t grasped the concepts and know nothing about the most important element of them all, story, story, damned story!)
Football is less forgiving than that, as are all professional sports.
It is possible, teaching the basics, to make a passable footballer out of a mediocre one … passable in the sense that you can kick the ball around and look like you know what you are doing. But a passable one will never be a particularly good one. To be good requires talent, right from the start. It requires a certain skill-set.
But whilst there are players who possess a nearly supernatural ability with the ball, a kind of sixth sense and perception that is impossible to teach and are thus elevated far above the level of mere mortals, I’ve seen examples where good players have, through diligence and training, hard work and time, become great ones.
It can be done, but only a handful of managers knows how.
Brendan gives every impression of being one of them.
He has turned Moussa Dembele into a standout. He has revitalised the career of Scott Sinclair. He has made Stuart Armstrong a far better footballer and he has, it seems, changed the fortunes of Kieran Tierney. He has spoken at length about trying to make Leigh Griffiths the player we want him to be.
Good managers sign good players.
Brendan is an exceptional manager.
He is going to make good players into better ones.
Into great ones, just like him.
We really are lucky to have this guy.
A manager who can develop players doesn’t have to buy quite so many of them.