Kuhn Is The Walking Embodiment Of The Celtic Boss’s Talent For Developing Players.

One of the most impressive things so far about how the team is playing, continuing from pre-season, is the transformation of every player under the manager.

Several players stand out particularly well in this regard, but the most notable improvement is in Nicholas Kuhn. Despite Daizen Maeda’s excellent performance, Kuhn had a strong case for being man of the match, considering his goal and assist once again.

Kuhn was brought to the club in the January transfer window, and it’s fair to say that his early performances were a bit hit and miss. There were some health issues, I believe, which made things difficult for him in the early stages.

But you can’t just look at those as the only things that have changed. He looks physically stronger than before, and that’s made a difference, but Brendan Rodgers has unleashed this player and undoubtedly made him better.

Let’s not forget that when Kuhn was signed, a couple of hacks did a fairly vicious hatchet job on him, finding some foreign “expert” to tell us how poor he was. I never believed Kuhn was destined to be a high-profile failure, but it is clear that there were some weaknesses in his game that the media used to cast doubt on him before he even signed.

Whatever those weaknesses were, Rodgers has worked on them with Kuhn, and as a result, he has improved by leaps and bounds. There’s a lesson here for those who falsely claim that Rodgers hasn’t improved anyone since his return to Celtic Park. The obvious example of improvement is Matt O’Riley, but he’s far from the only one.

Rodgers has changed the games of several players, including Kyogo Furuhashi, Maeda, Luis Palma, Alistair Johnston, Liam Scales, and others.

He has done a great job of making good players better and, in some cases, is on the brink of turning them into great players. This is especially true in Kuhn’s case.

For those at our club who are willing and able to learn from this, recognising what Rodgers has done and his talents is crucial, especially in this last important week of the transfer window. Everything that went wrong last summer is actually summed up by the way Rodgers has improved the core group of players.

One argument that this blog and others have made, which Rodgers himself has echoed, is that you cannot simply dump eight or nine project players on the manager at one time and expect him to turn them into superstars. That’s not how this works. You can bring on development players and Academy prospects, but it has to be done right. It has to be done at the right pace, and those players need to be integrated into an established team.

Expecting to build a team solely from those players is never going to work. That’s not what good development managers do.

It’s not beyond the realms of possibility for a manager to watch three or four development players progress to such an extent that he’s willing to put them into the side at the same time, even as replacements for already established talents. But again, that requires a bedding-in period. It requires those players to be familiar with the club and their teammates. You certainly cannot do it the way people at our club evidently expected Rodgers to.

Had we signed three quality players, as the manager has said, and brought in one or two projects around them, I have no doubt those project players would already be on the cusp of becoming first-team regulars because Rodgers would have improved them out of sight. But he was never going to do that with so many of them. Some of those guys won’t be back at Celtic Park, and with the right system, they could have improved here and thrived.

Rodgers can be a miracle worker when it comes to players.

He can make them better than they even thought they could be, and O’Riley is the classic example. He was not an ineffective footballer under Ange Postecoglou, but his progress under Rodgers is the reason we’re fighting off £20 million-plus bids for him right now.

The same applies to Nicholas Kuhn, who looks sensational this season. It’s one of the reasons why many of us who thought we needed more quality out wide are reasonably relaxed about the lack of progress in signing a player for that area.

Kuhn looks like a new player, and his goals and assists already make him an early candidate for Player of the Year. That might sound crazy, but if he keeps scoring and laying on goals, it’s going to be very difficult for anyone in this league to stop him from walking away with that title.

I think it’s obvious there was always talent there because Rodgers can’t work with nothing. No manager can. But what the really good coaches do is work not only on strengthening areas where players already have something but also on developing those areas where they don’t.

This is highlighted over and over again when you listen to the manager, especially when he talks about players like Luis Palma.

Palma was criticised as a footballer who didn’t work hard enough and would have to learn to track back and do everything else. But you can already see in the matches we’ve watched Palma play that he’s taking the manager’s lessons on board and is a better footballer for it, and a better asset to the team.

That’s how development works. That’s how Rodgers works best. When you see the performances of the whole team so far this season, you can see the hard work that has gone into improving things and pushing every player to limits they didn’t even know they had.

It’s tremendous watching us right now, but watching the improved players like Nicholas Kuhn in particular has been an absolute joy.

Hopefully, it continues all the way through this season.