The Celtic Boss And His Predecessor Cut Two Very Different Figures Right Now.

Football bosses are always under pressure, but I have never seen a Celtic boss put under greater, or harsher, scrutiny than Brendan Rodgers was put under this season, and he spoke about that again today when he mentioned how it started, for real, on 26 August and never let up. 26 August folks; weeks into his second tenure as manager.

We all know this is true. The hacks did everything they could to undermine this guy. They pushed every negative narrative they could about him, and at the end of it he’s sitting there smiling like a champ and taking the plaudits he deserves.

The mood at Celtic is excellent as we go into the title party tomorrow and towards the cup final next week. This is where we should have been all season long, but the directors made that incredibly difficult in the way they went about the summer transfer business. Rodgers had to work damned hard to counter, and then repair, the damage that did to us.

This club needs a better summer this time around, but the boss sounds an awful lot like a man in total control of his surroundings again, and that’s where we want him to be.

Way down in London, Ange Postecoglou sat in front of a media which is not inclined to bend down and kiss the ring. They never really were, but for a while he made them forget their doubts and get onboard with the magic formula it was that he was trying to sell them.

It brings me no satisfaction at all to see that man being put under cross examination, or to have to defend his comments of midweek which I thought were on the money and not in the least bit surprising or controversial, considering the number of people at his club who couldn’t think further than what their getting a result might mean to Arsenal.

A lot of people have wondered if our fans would feel the same way as Spurs fans did; I for one would have focussed on what a victory meant for us rather than for our rivals. It’s not as if there was nothing at stake in that match. They had a Champions League place to fight for and the notion that it should be pissed away to satisfy an urge to see a rival suffer would have struck me as every bit as ridiculous as it struck our former manager.

According to The Athletic, what made it worse is this was a viewed shared by some on his own coaching staff, people I reckon will be out of the door at that club pretty pronto. His fury stems from what it says about the mentality of a club which should be charting its own course and is more interested in nonsense about what other folk might do.

Like the club across the city in many ways. It’s second-tier loser thinking. To take more satisfaction from your opponents slips than you do from our own triumphs … you need to be very short on triumphs, I think, to think like that in the first place.

Spurs is a pretty poor excuse for a major club, though I’ll grant you their status as an EPL “contender” confers that title on them.

Saying that they are a pretty poor excuse for one is not hindsight but exactly what some of us said when he took the job there in the first place. I keep hearing phrases like “sleeping giant.” Manchester Utd is a sleeping giant; you have to be a giant in the first place to earn the use of that particular term. United is a side waiting to reach its true station again. Spurs has had a spell or two as a big-hitter. They haven’t been that for eons now.

It is 16 years since they won major silverware. It was 1961 when they last won a title. They have sacked managers with a grim and depressing regularity, and I never thought Ange stood more than a token chance of breaking that ghastly run.

I hoped he would. I hope he does. I think it reflects well on Scottish football and our club if he can make an honest-to-God go of it at Spurs. I think it helps us attract players and even coaches here when they see which horizons they can make their own when they leave.

So it’s tough to see that as Rodgers has overcome his critics and is now sitting with a newly strengthened mandate and even more success that Ange is facing the opposite of all those things; that instead of a chastened media he is now facing one that is ever more ferocious in his presence and ever more emboldened to think he doesn’t belong there at all.

It’s a Hell of a contrast, and I hope he finds a way to navigate it. But the impression – which many of us had from the off – that this is the wrong guy in the wrong script is hard to shake. Somewhere else, Ange might have been able to pull it off … but Spurs is not a club built for it any more than Sevco is. He has learned that fact late in the day … what he does with those lessons will decide his future.

Rodgers learned to his own cost that too many people at Celtic Park didn’t want to change, and didn’t want to fully equip this club for success if it meant doing it the way he wanted it. But he fought his good fight and we’ll hopefully see how convincingly he did so in the summer to come. It’s other people at Celtic we’ll be watching … to see how they handle their own lessons.