The Celtic boss does not need tactical advice from Stevie Robinson … or Michael Gannon.

Yesterday, Michael Gannon at the Daily Record published a piece suggesting changes to the Celtic team for the weekend’s game against the Ibrox club.

Now, most of those suggested changes involved us trying to ape the visitors and their style. But there was another suggestion in there that was, in its own way, even worse. I personally don’t understand why we would want to do any of it.

Of course, we’ll have to tweak our tactical approach a little to account for their counterattacking game—the one they most often play in Europe—but the kind of wholesale changes Gannon is proposing are ridiculous.

It’s bad enough that he thinks we should be trying to copy a lot of the Ibrox club’s tactics. But then he suggested we should mimic St Mirren’s approach. He actually thinks Brendan Rodgers should be taking lessons from Stevie Robinson.

That’s amusing, if he genuinely believes it. And I’m not sure that he does. I think it’s just one of those articles designed to create a stir and generate controversy.

He also suggests that Greg Taylor might start at left-back because he “knows the fixture,” as if Rodgers is going to pick players based on that rather than simply selecting the best ones. He thinks Adam Idah might start through the middle instead of Maeda because, by removing Maeda, Tavernier would have an easier game—as if he’s going to have a great afternoon facing Jota.

Now, I don’t think the Idah debate is a complete non-starter. Big Idah can definitely play the role of roughhousing a defence that isn’t up to it, and with Maeda on the left, he’ll terrorise their backline. But it looks likely that they’ll play Tavernier in central defence anyway, and the idea of him pretending to be a centre-back against the roving Maeda is just too good not to come to pass. I think we’ll see it happen.

Gannon does get one thing right: if we start on the front foot, hit our stride early, and—especially—score early, it won’t matter what they do. Their game plan will go out the window, and we’ll take them apart. The really important thing for us is to focus on our own game and do better in the areas where we fell short at Ibrox.

The Ibrox club isn’t the only team to beat us this season. We’ve had a couple of shaky performances—none worse than that one—but nobody panicked over it. We were disappointed, to say the least, and a lot of fans were baffled at full-time as to how it had gotten away from us to that extent. But there was no meltdown. The team certainly didn’t panic. They just got right back to winning games, just as they did after the Hibs defeat the other week.

That’s what makes a title-winning side. It’s about how you respond and recover from setbacks. A team that’s going to win things has to take the blows and get on with it. That’s exactly what we did. We didn’t rip up our structure or radically change our style. We made modest tweaks, adjusted little things, and moved forward.

I remember coming out of Dortmund and thinking that if we’d done a couple of things better that night, the result might not have been so harsh.

At every stage this season when we’ve fallen short in a game, it’s been clear that we were undone by silly mistakes and lapses in concentration. A couple of the goals they scored at Ibrox came from us giving the ball away under minimal pressure. Since then, we’ve gone to Bayern Munich and secured an outstanding result against far better players than they have at their disposal.

As I said the other day, Rodgers spoke at the weekend about how we’ve learned from that game. He knows what went wrong, and he and the team have already talked about fixing it. In fact, they probably started working on solutions the day after the match. We might have even seen some of those solutions implemented in recent games without realising it.

When that man says he’s ready, he’s ready. He does not need Michael Gannon at the Daily Record giving him tactical advice. He does not need to ask Stevie Robinson how to beat the Ibrox club. And with a full week to prepare, I think Rodgers will field the best players available to him in the best configuration possible. That means Schloop at left-back, Maeda through the middle, and Jota and Kuhn out wide.

But whatever the lineup, whatever the configuration, it will be all Rodgers. He won’t seek outside advice. He knows what he needs to know. He’s the one who spoke about learning lessons. He’s the one who talked about them “stealing our game.” That doesn’t suggest we’re about to start playing theirs—it suggests we’re going to play our own game a lot better than we did that day.

And that’s exactly how it should be. I firmly believe that if it ain’t broke, you don’t try to fix it. This is the system that’s on the brink of delivering a treble. It’s the system that has progressed us in Europe. Rodgers has this covered.

Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

Our latest podcast, Hampden Here We Come, is up now.