Celtic’s Summer Transfer Window Looks Even Worse In Light Of Rodgers Asian Cup Remarks.

When did this blog first highlight the Asian Cup issue?

It was last season.

It wasn’t even during the summer, it was last season, when one look at our replacement for Giakoumakis made it clear that we were going to have a problem there.

Oh will almost certainly make the Korean squad. That meant we had three front men all of whom would be away in that tournament.

In the summer window we signed two more Korean players, one of whom has a really good chance of being away. He happens to be a winger, which is another player out of the front line.

We could also be missing Iwata and Hatate.

If Tillio gets his chance, plays and impresses he will almost certainly be away with the Australians. How many players is that?

The risk of this has been obvious to me for over a year.

It’s been screaming at us.

I wrote, in the summer, that we needed to be thinking about this and sign some players in the window who reflected that risk, including a striker. We didn’t.

At the presser the other day, someone finally asked Rodgers the most obvious question to face this team over the next three months.

What do we do when our entire forward line is away? He says we’ll sign a striker. He says the club has been aware of this.

On the surface of it, yes of course they were, since it was clear and obvious and not subject to change. This isn’t a risk, it’s a reality.

But we are no more “ready” for it than we were ready for the Champions League this season, and I know whose fault that is.

This is an issue that we have scandalously failed to prepare for.

Rodgers says the opposite, but I’m afraid I’m not buying that. It’s nonsense, I’m afraid. If it had been planned for we’d already have the backup striker in the squad, familiar with the setup and his fellow players and already scoring goals.

Out of eight summer signings, three of them are eligible to play in that tournament. That’s how we “planned for it”, by introducing the possibility of being short even more of our players for the tournament. I mean which genius thought that was a good idea?

The more you look at that window the more obvious is the utter contempt it showed for the manager’s requirements and the needs of the team.

Our failure to sign a striker is disgraceful in light of Rodgers remarks.

He cannot possibly believe that we have prepared well for this situation when it’s so clear that we haven’t. We should be miles out in front of this, we’ve had enough lead time, and instead we’re reduced to scrambling about in the space of a week or two to try and get someone in the door … and that someone will be expected to carry the forward line on his own for a half dozen games.

Not only does he have to hit the ground running, but if he gets injured, we have serious problems.

Nobody whose focus was the betterment of the team would have allowed us to get into this situation and as Rodgers has made it clear that he wasn’t responsible for that the finger should be pointed at the people who are.

He ought not to have permitted it though. He better hope that we don’t come to regret it domestically, as we have in Europe.

We’re walking into a potentially dangerous problem here and that would be hard to credit even if some of us hadn’t been banging the warning drum for over a year.

That Rodgers is trying to pretend that he thinks we’re ready is an indictment of what he has permitted to be done in his name, and he better start getting a grip on this fast.