If Kris Boyd told me it was raining and I had just come in from the downpour I would touch my hair to make sure that it was wet.
That’s how little faith I put in nearly everything that man says.
Yet today he’s in the media making a rather extraordinary claim about Brendan Rodgers which, knowing what we know about him, is very, very difficult to simply dismiss.
Boyd is not a credible journalist; we all know that.
But I’m here to write about rumours and this is a good starting point.
Boyd says he got a text from our former manager over the weekend, a text that was not very complimentary.
The reason he got it is that he had praised Celtic’s performance at Ibrox this weekend and how it compares with Rodgers’ this time last year.
Now we won at the weekend and lost that match. To me, that suggests that Lennon’s game-plan was much more effective. It suggests that his team selection and tactics were absolutely bang on and that even the pre-match preparations were all on the nose.
According to Boyd, Rodgers has issues with that analysis.
His specific problem appears to be that Boyd had said we didn’t need to play “tippy tappy football” in order to win.
Boyd’s comparison of how Lennon got the job done and how Rodgers’ team was playing in the latter half of his reign was nothing this blog and others haven’t been writing about since Lennon was hired. Rodgers’ team had become predictable and dull, and that wasn’t even last season but in the season before that.
Boyd, for once, has it spot on.
He shouldn’t get excited; I suspect it’s a one off and even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The question is, do we believe him that Rodgers responded so negatively to what was a fairly light critique of their respective styles?
And you know what? I actually do. It sounds like the kind of thing Rodgers would get up to.
Boyd describes the man and his tests as “prickly”. It’s similar to the word I’d use to describe our former boss, except that I’d be more economical with the letters.
Rodgers is a self-centred idiot, a shining example of pure narcissism.
This kind of thing is totally in character for him, and Boyd has no reason to gild the lily here. Rodgers is already despised by much of our support anyway. He’s not tarnishing a legacy here; the Irishman pretty much accomplished that on his own.
The success he brought us will always be remembered and fondly.
The man himself, not so much.
If I were making a list of the people I’d expect to be foaming when Celtic secures nine in a row, Rodgers would certainly not have been on it, but maybe he should be. He clearly has trouble imagining Lennon doing well as his managerial successor.
He certainly has difficulty with the idea that a Lennon Celtic team might be more attractive to watch.
(They are, at least in comparison to what was being served up in the last two campaigns. More than once in that time I watched Celtic play with the nagging realisation that somewhere paint was drying and I could have been watching that instead.)
Rodgers was clearly watching the game at the weekend, but his thoughts at full-time were apparently not about how well our club did or how well we played.
On a day when real Celtic fans were toasting Lennon’s success, he was sniping by text at a third rate hack and defending his own record; this is where his priorities lie and where they’ve always lay, with himself.
The Rumour Guy is a Celtic fan who doesn’t like Brendan Rodgers very much … or Kris Boyd either, for that matter.
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