Rodgers Is Still Allowing Those Above Him At Celtic To Drag Their Feet.

I do not care for Brendan Rodgers latest comments on transfers. Not at all.

He says he’s in no hurry to get deals in, because they have to be the right deals for the club. Understandable, up to a point. If we were hurtling towards the window with injuries mounting up suddenly and players banging on the door to leave then you can understand why he might not feel like those above him are responsible because they didn’t move faster. But this is not like that at all. We’re now 19 days into the window and the only thing we’re heading for is the end of it.

He sat there at a press conference many weeks ago and assured fans that in terms of the Asian Cup that the club had everything in hand. They had been talking about it for a while, they were ready, they were prepared. This blog has already pointed out that this is largely a nonsense. No club that was “prepared” and “thinking about this” already would have brought in one third of our summer signings knowing they might be called up to play in that competition.

Those above Brendan Rodgers left us scandalously exposed for that spell. Scandalously exposed. If we now lose Kyogo to injury we’re going through the remainder of this month and the better part of the next largely without a recognised striker. For a club like Celtic and one which saw the Asian Cup on the calendar and must have known what it meant that is absolutely not good enough at all.

They have had months to get a target list in place, a realistic one, and to start working off it. Months. If we’re no nearer a signing and talking about leaving it up until the last day then that’s a disgraceful situation for this club to have found itself in. We should have been up and ready to go the moment the starting gun was fired. What in God’s name have our “recruitment department” spent all that time on?

Today Josh Doig signed for a club in Italy, for a fee we could have afforded. The Ibrox club was linked with him for a while. Good enough to play in Serie A but not good enough for the SPFL. Is that our attitude? You may argue that he would not have been more than a backup to Taylor, but right now that’s a backup we don’t have because Bernabei is a waste of a jersey.

I am not arguing that we should have signed Doig. But for people to be trotting out the same old pitiful excuse that it’s “hard” to do business in January isn’t going to cut it at all, and for Rodgers to sit there as the picture of nonchalance and hand the board yet another opportunity to stiff him … is this guy stupid or what?

This is like dealing with the Ibrox club here. If you give these people an inch, they will take the mile. Give them the opportunity to drag their feet and they’ll do it just to save money on the wage bill. This board needs to be harassed to spend money, it has to be harried to keep the foot on the gas or it just won’t.

“There’s a lot of work going on and hopefully before the window shuts, we can improve the squad,” he said. Hopefully? It should be inconceivable that we don’t strengthen further. But what’s worse is that he then added the following unbelievable piece of nonsense. “It normally goes right through to the end.”

Yeah because we have a board that doesn’t care to shift into gear if it saves a few quid on fees. That they are allowed to get away with this so regularly disgusts me. We have plenty of money to spend. Leaving it to the last minute doesn’t improve your chances, it lets people know you are desperate.

But Rodgers wasn’t finished. “I am quite relaxed on it. I know what we need to improve but unless it’s the right type of quality and player then we won’t be in a rush to do anything.”

And who decides that? And if the right type and quality of player isn’t known to us right now, then I repeat; what have people at Celtic been doing all this time?

Let me tell you what the fixture list coming up looks like. After the Scottish Cup we have Ross County at home. Following that it’s Aberdeen and Hibs away, then Kilmarnock who have beaten us twice, albeit this is at Celtic Park. That takes us beyond the Asian Cup but we’ll have players who are fatigued and probably in need of some downtime, or we risk late season burnout.

We also have a Scottish Cup fourth round squeezed in there somewhere; this is not one of those situations where the board can get away with doing damn all.

It’s not good enough to bring players in at the last minute; we have Aberdeen away three days after the window shuts, so what time are guys supposed to have to get to know their team-mates prior to that?

We have Hibs right on the heels of that, four days later.

If we’re not ready – and I mean with players bedded in – for those games that’s a problem, and those problems multiply exponentially if the board, listening to how relaxed Rodgers is, decides not to proceed with signing anybody else because our players will only be in Asia for a further few days.

If a weakened Celtic team drops points in those games, or we get a horror draw and go out of the Scottish Cup in the fourth round, I am going to blame people in our boardroom, but I’m also going to blame the manager for the utter stupidity of leaving so many hostages to fortune. These people walked all over him during the summer, and if he continues to act weak that’s how he’ll be treated by them going forward and right now that could cost us a league title.

He won’t survive that. I hope he knows it. There is no question of it whatsoever. If he’s content to dance to the tune of people with no skin in the game that’s his look-out because they won’t hesitate to dispense with him. He needs to have his arms all the way around this and I don’t like the way he came across when he said that today.

He’s letting them squander time he doesn’t have.