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Kennedy Has Waited Too Long To Play The Footballers We’ll Soon Depend On.

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John Kennedy is going to play some of the “fringe players” tonight.

Wow. What a great idea. If only he’d “thought of it” sooner.

The players he’s talking about are more than likely the ones this club is going to be depending on next season.

They should have been in the team much earlier than this.

It would have been good for Celtic. Good for the players.

It would have been good for John Kennedy himself.

I cannot understand why he has waited until there’s nothing left to play for, even pride, before he’s giving these guys a go in the team, and we don’t really know yet if he will because kick-off is still hours away.

But if, as expected, some of these guys are going to play it’s long overdue.

This whole thing hasn’t done Kennedy a lot of good. He had a chance to put his mark on this team, even in a short time window.

Had he been more adventurous he could have been a cup winning manager; we certainly have a squad capable of delivering that. If he’d gotten us over the line he could have written his own ticket.

He wouldn’t have been manager but he could have had any role on the coaching staff he wanted under the new boss and no-one would have complained.

I think it was a huge missed opportunity for him, although at this point it’s probably worth pointing out that achieving it would have required him having the skill-set needed to pull it off and that’s where there are some doubts where Kennedy is concerned.

But fielding the same players in the same basic system every week did him no favours and virtually assured failure, both his and ours as a club. Gerrard has openly boasted about how he and his coaches were able to plan for the game knowing how we’d line up.

Everyone in Scotland knew how we’d line up.

Gerrard and his people aren’t tactical geniuses; the ability to read and react to likely strategies is a requirement for every board-game you ever played as a kid.

Anyone who ever won a single chess-match has all the tools at their disposal to match an opponent whose plan can be predicted in advance.

As welcome as it will be tonight to have some of these guys in the team – and Barkas in particular; no player at Parkhead, save perhaps for Ajeti will so benefit from having a new manager in the building – a good performance and a resounding win will tell us what? Nothing at all? Or that Kennedy would have been better off playing these guys weeks ago.

I’m actually looking forward to these guys showing us what they can do tonight.

This is a chance for some of them to impress the next guy … who according to some is closer to being in the building than ever before. If so, tonight would be a good night for these players to turn it on.

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