From the very first moment Brendan Rodgers walked through the doors at Celtic Park he was stalked by various ghosts, and omens.
The announcement itself was made for maximum impact, thrown into the news cycle for the Scottish Cup Final last season. Sevco’s swagger at the time was manifest; they really thought they were on their way to something, having beaten us in the semi-final, a result they hoped would plunge our club into trauma.
It didn’t. We finished the league campaign on a high, and Ronny bowed out in style and with a grace that befits a good and decent man. We wished him well.
Then we waited a few days and just when the Sevco circus was in full swing we whipped the rug out from under them. It’s not every announcement that can wipe a cup final off the back pages of the papers on the day of the game itself … but every single one of them, from the broadsheets to the tabloids, screamed Brendan Rodgers’ name.
It was a PR coup of monumental proportions, perhaps the finest piece of seizing the news agenda from a rival that I have ever seen in my life and it was timed so beautifully that there was quite literally nothing they could do to get it back. The hoopla that surrounded their “big day” was dialled down to nearly zero. Their fans went to that game filled with foreboding, and it proved justified when the Hibees duly nailed them.
With a last minute goal.
We didn’t know it then, but it was the first brick in the wall, and only in hindsight does it look portentous. You had to see the whole picture, which only yesterday became clear, to understand how it slotted into it. Now the wheel has come full circle. Another last minute winner at the same ground has capped a delirious, incredible, unbeatable twelve months. Now Gray’s perfectly timed moment looks almost like the first wave of Brendan’s magic wand. The delirium of the day before meshed perfectly with Hibs performance … it was almost like they took a lift from his appointment too, and the Celt’s in the team certainly raised their game.
The summer passed in a haze. The pre-season preparations were tough. Some of the team selections were baffling, although, again, in hindsight they all make sense. Brendan spent that time trying to decipher the Ronny Deila system. He tried Callum as a holding midfielder, to work out what it was that Ronny saw. He tried the Brown-Bitton fulcrum for size. He experimented with Lustig at central defence. He chopped and changed. He tried different things.
How’s this for portentous? His first competitive game as Celtic boss came on 12 July 2016. It is not a date any Celtic fan would ever have ringed in the calendar, but it’s in our history now, and the story isn’t whole, the picture not complete, without it.
We’ve come to know it as the Shock Of Gibraltar.
So it started like that. With a disbelieving anger at the performance, the result, and Brendan’s almost un-natural calm in the aftermath. We had been beaten by a team of part-timers, in easily the worst result in our club’s history and it wasn’t tempered, even slightly, by the knowledge that it was the first leg and one we would certainly avenge at Celtic Park.
It was lamentable. It was the kind of blow a lot of managers don’t come back from. I wrote at the time that had Ronny still been manager that would have been the night that changed that, and he would have been gone by sun-up the following day. I wasn’t calling for Brendan’s head – there was no over-reaction to that result, anywhere – but it seemed clear that a major task lay ahead of the man in the dugout, a bigger one than he perhaps thought.
It’s easy to say that none of us saw an unbeaten season coming at that point; that would be stating the bloody obvious. As late as Christmas, with the team by then in full flow, I thought it was a bridge too far in Brendan’s first season in charge. To have even contemplated it in July, in the aftermath of that result, would have been lunatic optimism. A bookie would have given you 5000-1 on it. It wasn’t unlikely as much as it was purely and simply unthinkable.
So how did it happen?
How did we get from the cup final last year to the cup final yesterday, the duration of Brendan Rodgers’ reign so far, on the back of that defeat?
Again, you can only see, in hindsight, where the crucial moments came, and for Brendan it came standing on the turf in Gibraltar after the full-time whistle, when he was asked whether the result made him feel ashamed and he said no, there was no shame in it and he was confident the players would turn it around. That unflappable, logical, response which I had found so infuriating at the time, was, when you look back, actually the perfect one.
Because success is built on blood, sweat and tears.
It is built from hardship and built on the foundations of prior setbacks.
As the cup semi-final defeat beget the end of Ronny’s reign and ushered Brendan’s time in, so too was a season of glory, of utter triumph, constructed on top of that epic, earth-shaking loss. I don’t know if we’d have had such success without it.
It’s been a season of high-points which were almost too many to count, but at the core of it all was a team spirit and ability to handle pressure which I have never seen bettered by a Celtic side.
There are moments which stand out in technicolour.
Take the Astana game, and the late penalty kick. The pressure of that moment can only be imagined by us mere mortals who’ve never stepped up to anything like it. Moussa is 19 years old, and there were already some snipers in the media having a go although it was his settling in period. They were setting this kid up to be a failure, and that was the moment they had their pencils sharpened for, and for the manager too of course for preferring him to Leigh.
The composure Moussa shows in dispatching that kick is incredible in one so young, and it’s clear that the courage and heart which was later to get us through other big moments was already starting to grow in this Celtic team. That a player just in the door was able to carry the weight of that moment, on behalf of all of us, is telling.
When Sevco came to Celtic Park and we scored the second late at the end of the first half, it settled the nerves in the stands and – I thought – on the pitch. When they then scored a minute later, with their first shot at goal, I thought “Christ sake.”
It was a bad way to go in for the break, but any worries I had about it denting the confidence were quickly erased as we played them off the park in the second half.
At Ibrox they were a goal in front of us. We came back to win, through heart and drive as much as by those moments of sheer class. In the League Cup semi-final we kept the heads and kept on believing right up to the final minute. And that attitude got us our reward.
It’s been there, all season long.
That grit, that steel, that sheer belief.
It was on display yesterday in the way we blasted back from 1-0 down to equalise within 120 seconds. It was there, most notably, in Motherwell when we had perhaps our biggest scare of the season and came storming back to win the match.
At one point during the game yesterday the commentator spoke about how many single goals wins we had this season; it wasn’t a sneering comment, I think it was a mark of respect. Teams don’t win things without an ability to grind on the days when that’s needed.
When you think about it, this team has it all. We’re capable of winning on those days when it seems like pushing a rock up a hill. We can come back from adversity. We can react under pressure. We can raise our game to a different level when we need to.
And we’re capable of playing beautiful – even blistering – football.
Look at the way we passed the ball yesterday in the last ten minutes. Probing. Careful. Measured. And we opened up their defence again and again and again. The goal was coming. You could see it. Aberdeen’s players – who deserve immense credit – had pressed and probed and gave their all.
But at that point they were dead on their feet and we were ruthless and cunning enough to play on it.
We made them chase us when what they wanted most of all was to sit back and hold on for extra time. And we found gaps and channels and pulled them apart. When Rogic made his run their players were exhausted, mentally and physically … and not a single Celtic player looked beat. There was a moment when Leigh took a second to breathe late in the game, but it came after a lung-bursting run no Aberdeen player had left in him.
It wasn’t a day for beautiful football.
It was a day for that blood, sweat and tears.
It was a day for digging deep.
We’ve seen plenty of the beautiful football though; in a sense perhaps we’ve been spoiled by how much of it we’ve witnessed.
Two 5-1’s, home and away, against our so-called rivals. A 3-0 League Cup final win against Aberdeen. Beating them 4-1 at home. Taking apart Hearts in major beatings; 4-0 at home and 5-0 away. Inverness were the first team to take points off us, but we avenged that by scoring 13 times against them without reply in the next two SPL games and one Scottish Cup match, including a blazing 6-0 home win. We also put 5 past Thistle. We put 5 past Motherwell and St Johnstone. We scored 5 in the home tie against Hapoel. We scored another 6 against Kilmarnock. The goals flowed all season long.
In total there were 149 them across the season, in all competitions.
There were 95 assists.
There were four hat-tricks – three of them from Moussa and one from Sinclair.
Our goal difference column of plus 81 in the SPL was assisted by Craig Gordon’s 20 clean sheets.
Over all of it towers Brendan, whose calm and composure is second only to his ability to change a game with a single decision. In Astana he knew when to tighten up. In Tel Aviv we were all over the place and he knew how to stop the bleeding. He made a courageous change at Hampden in the League Cup semi-final and we unlocked the door. His tactical brilliance transformed the game at Motherwell which was the closest we came this season to a domestic defeat. That we took three points instead is actually a minor miracle, and that victory was completely the work of the manager and the changes he made.
This was his triumph, this team is his creation. He is the proof that the right manager can raise the games of everyone at the club.
Other clubs think the answer is to spend, even cash they do not have, and which imperils their very existence.
Good managers can identify good players and if they are lucky they can afford them.
Great managers improve what they have, and you only have to look at the players who took the field that night – now seemingly distant – in Gibraltar in July last year. They look like different footballers now. They are harder, tougher, more complete.
The club is in fantastic shape, and the scenes yesterday – and those amazing ones from the Legends game today – show the entire institution is unified and marching in step as never before. 12 months ago, we were all wracked by nerves, wondering who the new boss would be and hoping the club did not make a risky option or go for a media darling who’s appointment would be hailed in the press but who would not take us forward; someone like Malky McKay.
But on this one they didn’t let us down.
Earlier today as I watched the game again, one of the finest moments came at the end, when the players were celebrating on the pitch and the commentary team collared Brendan for their interview with the treble winning manager.
“The fans love you,” the guy asked him. “Have you come to love this club too?”
And Brendan said “no”, he hadn’t. Because he always had. Because he was “born into Celtic”, in a Celtic family, as a part of all this right from the start. “It was always my ambition to manage here,” he said, and then with the humility we know him for he talked about how lucky and privileged he felt to be here at this moment in time.
Martin and Neil were both Celtic men; we know that. But Brendan’s depth of feeling for Celtic is the most complete I’ve seen in a manager since Tommy Burns. When we sing “this is how it feels to be Celtic” no-one knows it better than the man in the dugout.
This has been incredible, and as good as that was yesterday, as good as this campaign has been, as transformative as the last 12 months were, I don’t think we’ve seen the best of this team or this manager yet. We’re going to be stronger next season than we were in this one … and that says it all and it should send out a very clear message.
Scottish football ain’t seen nothing yet.
The unconquerable ain’t done conquering.