Jackson’s Rodgers piece displays again his startling ignorance of the game he writes about.

Let’s start by acknowledging this: Jackson’s piece today is hardly worth the full treatment. It’s so lacklustre that there’s barely any traction to be had from dissecting it. But there is one particular claim that stands out as especially ludicrous, and that deserves a proper response.

His article, centred around Brendan Rodgers and what he calls a “Messiah complex.”

It is a prime example of the nonsense that gets thrown at Rodgers by certain sections of the media. I don’t believe for a second that Rodgers suffers from any such delusions, but it’s exactly the kind of narrative spun by hacks who are eager to view him through a jaundiced lens.

The real kicker comes when Jackson references a 5-2 win Rodgers secured while managing Leicester City against Manchester City, which is indeed an impressive victory. After all, we’re talking about a side that’s dominated English football for nearly a decade.

However, Jackson takes this one isolated incident and tries to stretch it into evidence that Rodgers can change tactics on the fly. Then he poses the rather naive question: if Rodgers can do it for that game, why doesn’t he do it in Europe?

It’s a juvenile question at best, and outright idiotic if we’re being less generous.

Jackson clearly doesn’t grasp what he’s talking about. Rodgers actually touched on something in his Friday press conference that offers a bit of context. He said that the way Celtic play isn’t something you can just switch on and off. That’s a crucial point, and while it might escape the understanding of a casual football fan, a sports writer should get it. Unfortunately, we have some of the worst in the business, so it’s no surprise they don’t.

Rodgers is absolutely right.

It’s the same in any sport—when you commit to a certain style of play, every aspect of your training and preparation is geared towards that system. Think of a boxer trying to change his fighting style. Now imagine doing that for an entire football team. You’re training players day in, day out to perform intricate patterns of movement, high pressing, and positional awareness, all underpinned by discipline and repetition. You can’t just throw that out the window and expect them to seamlessly adopt a completely different approach overnight.

It can be done. You can drill teams in two different approaches. Rodgers has proved that he can do it at Celtic; look how many games we won in his first tenure with ten men on the pitch, including that remarkable victory at Ibrox when Edouard got the winner.

But Rodgers is correct in saying you can’t simply turn the kind of football we play on and off at will. It is much, much more complicated than that.

To have a team capable of playing two distinct tactical systems, you’d need to drill them constantly in both. That’s not easy, and it’s certainly not something that can be mastered without consistent practice in games that matter.

I do think it would be in Celtic’s best interests to explore a more defensive setup from time to time, but expecting it to work flawlessly from the off is unrealistic. The team wasn’t built for it, and the players’ natural instincts are in direct opposition to that kind of football. It would take time to make it work, and until then, we’d look like ducks out of water.

Jackson also completely misses the context of that Leicester-Man City match. Let’s not forget, Leicester City, although they famously won the Premier League in one of the most astonishing campaigns we’ve ever seen, were not exactly a team built to slug it out with the elite.

Rodgers hadn’t trained them to be one.

That 5-2 win over City didn’t require a tactical overhaul. Leicester was already used to playing a counter-attacking style, which is exactly what they did in that game. It didn’t take a dramatic tactical revolution to pull it off.

Rodgers is, in fact, a more sophisticated coach than Ange Postecoglou. His track record is more varied, and his career more complex. Unlike Ange, who has largely stuck to one style of football, Rodgers has shown flexibility throughout his managerial career. He made notable tactical shifts several times in a single season at Liverpool, for example. It’s one of the reasons he’s been successful at so many different clubs.

But note that I said “tactical shifts.” What Jackson is talking about is not a tactical shift, it is a stylistic change and that is much more difficult to pull off.

It is completely feasible that Rodgers could teach this Celtic team to play a more defensive, pragmatic style if necessary. In fact, I think we might see something along those lines in the upcoming game against Atalanta. He’s too savvy to go into that match playing high-press, front-foot football and risk another heavy defeat. But the changes won’t be drastic, and they won’t be immediately obvious. His lineup will probably look very familiar.

Of course, there are deeper issues here than just Rodgers’ tactics.

I’ve touched on the coaching setup in a previous article, and in the next, I’ll discuss something else that’s not immediately apparent—personnel issues within the squad that make it challenging for us to adopt a more defensive style.

For now, though, let’s just acknowledge what we’re dealing with here.

Jackson, as usual, displays a severe lack of understanding when it comes to football. This is a guy who has covered the game for most of his life and still doesn’t seem to have cracked open a single book on coaching or tactics. It’s not enough for him to sit there and claim that none of us have ever managed a Champions League team, as if that’s some great defence of his ignorance.

Sure, none of us are Champions League managers.

But some of us have taken the time to educate ourselves on the fundamentals of the game so we can actually understand what we’re watching and writing about. I’m sorry that he hasn’t, but it’s not surprising.

Too many in the Scottish media are fundamentally lazy. They don’t do their research, they don’t strive to understand the game in any real depth, and yet they feel qualified to lecture our manager on how to run his team. It’s laughable.

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