Rodgers Left Celtic Because We Refused To Push On. Gerrard Leaped Off A Sinking Ship.

Whatever way they want to look at it, today is a sobering day for the Ibrox club and it should be a sobering day for their supporters as well.

Let me take you all back a bit to the day Brendan Rodgers left Celtic. We were all rightly furious not only about the manner of it but the timing.

I had a half sense, which I didn’t want to acknowledge, that the gig might be up when he refused to deny stories linking him to Leicester after his final game in charge, the one against Motherwell. The way he dodged the question rather than even give the token answer – “I have a job, I am focussed on that job” – should have had alarm bells ringing more than it did.

It seems pretty clear to me that he knew he was going that afternoon. Celtic has long denied that, but they had their PR guy on hand to babysit Rodgers during the pre-match interview and no deal is done at the speed at which that one was without talks taking place beforehand.

The whole thing reeked, and his decision to take the whole backroom team with him was like a decapitation strike. It was a minor miracle that we pulled it together and got through that. Had Lennon left at the end of that campaign – had the board used the time we’d bought to do a proper search for a proper manager – we’d be in a different place.

So would Gerrard. But that’s another story.

We had the resources to go out and appoint a top drawer candidate, and then back him lavishly. We chose not to. That mistake will haunt every member of our board until the day they die, and then history will damn them for it.

It wasn’t just that we must have known the weekend of the Motherwell game that the exit was imminent, we must have known it for many months before then. I knew the morning after the AEK Athens game at Celtic Park that Rodgers wasn’t going to be at the club the following year.

Sitting at a meeting with Peter Lawwell it became abundantly clear that there had been a massive falling out and that egos were now running amuck.

We should have been miles down the road towards appointing his successor.

Yet we acted, as a club, as if it had come as a thunderbolt from a clear sky. It seems clear that our board had made a decision on Lennon way before the Rodgers crisis; they weren’t going to let a little thing like his self-detonation at Hibs stand in the way of getting their man.

It is absolutely pathetic, and a scandalous lack of leadership and ambition.

At the time I regarded the timing out of it as the true outrage, that and the fact he left us in the lurch when he took every one of his coaches and all the analytics staff with him. We netted a cool sum of money for it, of course. We didn’t spend it though.

This is why I don’t find the sneering about Ibrox receiving a fraction of that sum, which is happening on certain Celtic sites today, in the least bit funny. The mammoth fee we got for Rodgers alone gave us the wherewithal to go and hire an up and coming, modern manager with all the right ideas. Instead we went for a “three times around the clothes pole” coach.

So, no. Whatever other amusing thoughts I entertain this afternoon, none of them are about the size of the fee Ibrox received.

But I know why Rodgers left. I know that he felt undermined by certain people within Parkhead. I know he was second guessed on transfer deals. I know he had players pushed on him by people who weren’t remotely qualified to make football decisions.

Yes, Rodgers had ego and arrogance enough for ten people, as he’s shown again and again, but the simple fact is that his time at Celtic was spoiled for him by some of those inside the walls. The chief culprit being Peter Lawwell, proving the truth of that old adage about power that you “never outshine the master.” Rodgers sometimes forgot who that was and Lawwell became over-fond of reminding him. That was never going to be a marriage made in heaven.

We were restricted in our thinking and in our ambition. Rodgers never was. He saw what Celtic had the potential to be and wanted us to at least try and realise it. The directors were not on the same page, and that was always going to cause problems.

The comparisons with what has happened at Ibrox are obviously being made, but the two situations are absolutely nothing alike at all. The critical difference is this; Rodgers left Celtic because he felt underappreciated and undermined and because he had taken the club as far as he could because those running it had no intention of pushing beyond limited horizons, a belief that was borne out by who we chose to replace him with.

Celtic were in a good place when he left. He left because he didn’t see us moving any further forward, and he is a manager who always wants to be moving forward.

Steven Gerrard has leaped off the burning deck of a sinking ship.

That’s the significant point, and if the Ibrox fans want to see this as an opportunity rather than as a crisis – and it’s a crisis alright, there is no doubt about that at all – they should be looking to what it signifies rather than accepting the media wisdom that Gerrard was simply seduced by the EPL.

It is not as simple as that. There are underlying issues here and those issues will reveal what the club does next, just as the underlying issues at Celtic should have told us what to expect. If we’d had the will to hire a top class candidate the top class manager would never have felt like he had to leave in the first place.

At Ibrox, different dynamics are in play.

Gerrard has left a club which is now in reverse gear. They are going backwards.

He moaned about it openly in the press just a few months ago, when he complained of being thwarted in his efforts to spend more money they don’t have and sign more players they can’t afford. Ibrox fans refuse to accept the financial peril their club is in, but Gerrard sees the writing on the wall and he knew that far from strengthening the squad in January they’re going to weaken it.

There is trouble behind the scenes at Ibrox. It is borne out in Goldson’s refusal to sign a new deal, by the clear desire of certain players to move, by the fall out between the coaching staff and Morelos and the snarking between King and the board … these all point to issues which the media doesn’t want to explore, although it’s clear that there are stories to be told.

The appetite amongst the directors for continued spending appears at an end. Some of them were pleased to see the back of King and all his bombast and some of them won’t be sad to see the back of Gerrard either, who they backed to the hilt and beyond and who still wanted more.

It’s as if the reality of their position just never sank in with him.

You get the sense that what is happening at Ibrox now is a long delayed rendezvous with sanity. The high spending days may well be over. Certainly, their board’s appetite for that kind of madness is obviously at an end and this will have been a key factor in Gerrard making the decision.

Was there also an element of “taint by association” creeping in? He was photographed in a wee mutual love-in with the lunatic fringe shortly before those same Peepul marched down a Glasgow street singing a racist song. It all comes to bear eventually.

None of that will matter to some of the Ibrox fans. They won’t dig deep for reasons or for causes, they will find reasons to hate the guy and presume disloyalty. But Gerrard has never been “one of their own” no matter what nonsense they told themselves. He cares about himself and that’s all. If he had any affection for the Ibrox operation, he would never have made so many demands of them when they were cash-strapped and feeling the pinch.

The title triumph last season was for him. It was his, for himself, and nothing else.

Anyone at Ibrox who believed otherwise was a pure fool.

But the supporters over there did believe it, because although they wateched Rodgers walk out on us they believe themselves to be special, to be different, and that the relationship between them and a guy who was a self-confessed Celtic supporter before he got the gig there (no going back now either, Gerrard, you’ve shot that) now had blue white and red blood pumping in his veins.

This guy never cared a whit for them. He has departed Ibrox at the first opportunity – the first opportunity – and withoug a backward glance.

Gerrard is not the brain of Britain, but you don’t have to be to fool these people.

Today the man they thought of as a true believer has done what one of a similar ilk did to Celtic; he has decapitated the entire coaching team.

Because he saw the writing on the wall, and once he had he couldn’t get out the door fast enough.

That club is in real, real trouble this afternoon.