If Rodgers Doesn’t Change The System, The Celtic Board Will Push Their Failure On To Him

It should embarrass board apologists that we ended that game today with such a ridiculous eleven on the pitch.

Before this season began, if you’d told anyone we’d make a dozen signings over two windows and end that match with Ralston on the wrong side of the pitch, Welsh and Scales at centre back and Rocco Vata wide left they’d have looked at you in angry bafflement, hoping you were joking but recognising with the Lawwell’s in charge you might not be.

Without a doubt, they are to blame for the mess we are in.

Without a doubt. Let no-one dispute that for one minute longer. Four transfer windows under Lawwell junior have produced precisely one player who would be starting every week if everyone was fit; Alastair Johnston. And we can wonder whether or not he’s what we need in the present circumstances because he was dreadful today and he has been dreadful for weeks now.

I am loathe to hold the manager accountable for any of this.

If people want to scrutinise Rodgers then scrutinise the things he’s been saying from the moment he walked in the door.

He looked at this squad and knew immediately that it did not meet his needs. He has not been shy about letting us know that. Even off the back of a treble, he knew this side needed major changes if it was to play the style of football he has set out to play.

Pace and power. This side is completely absent those things. The midfield is as lightweight as I’ve ever seen it. Luis Palma might have been a star in an Ange Postecoglou side, playing high up the pitch, but in Rodgers game plan where he needs to be quick on his feet to get away from people he’s not living up to the job. That’s just one example.

There are people who think the answer is that Rodgers should just play “Ange’s football.” Since this is Ange’s squad, that should work, right?

But seriously? You need to have a very limited understanding of the game not to know that it won’t. If it was as easy as one manager playing the same sort of style as another one, we wouldn’t have needed to hire Ange Postecoglou or Brendan Rodgers in the first place, would we?

We could have flung a tactical study on Pepe Guardiola at John Kennedy and told him to get on with it. It simply does not work that way. It has never worked that way.

Brendan Rodgers is Brendan Rodgers and he must be allowed to manage in Brendan Rodgers’ way with Brendan Rodgers own players, specifically chosen to play within his system. Or there’s no point in having Brendan Rodgers in the job to begin with.

And yet, for all that, one thing is glaringly obvious; the manager is not getting a tune out of these players in this system and right now, and until the end of this season, these players are all he’s got.

This is not a problem he created; sadly, it is a problem that he is going to need to deal with.

Other clubs in this league have a genuine lack of resources, and although it is horrifying how swiftly this squad has gone backwards under Lawwell & Lawwell, he still has enough at his disposal to win this title with room to spare.

But not the way we’re playing right now.

He doesn’t have the players for it, and he knows that full well.

So, he can bang his head against the wall or he can adapt. He will have to adapt because otherwise we’re not going to win this league, and if we don’t win this league, he will be the one who swings for it. This board will throw him to the wolves without hesitation.

And I’ll tell you, that would be the biggest tragedy of this whole campaign, if it was Rodgers who ultimately carried the can for their lamentable conduct and disgraceful hiring practices.

Every other element of the football department, from the scouting to the coaches he’s surrounded by screams second rate and are stacked with board cronies and placemen; it is a shameful situation and it ought to make it clear that without changes above him that the manager falling on his sword will bring no relief, and offers no solution to our current problems.

All getting rid of him will achieve is it will let them hire yet another yes-man, and with their low level of ambition it might be far worse than this, and we might even look back on the Neil Lennon appointment with something like nostalgia.

It is imperative that these people have no reason to sack, or excuse, to sack Brendan Rodgers.

The only person who can avoid that now is him, and he has to if this club isn’t to end up in a worse position than we’re in right now, and I don’t care what he has to do to accomplish winning this league and assuring his own survival and neither should he.

Whatever it takes, he needs to do it.