The Celtic boss talked a good game, and then lamentably failed to deliver.

Tomorrow morning, myself, Joe and Eric are going to record the latest Trinity Tims podcast. We’d scheduled it for tomorrow morning and we’re not putting it off. We arranged it for then because we all expected that today would be about having a few drinks and celebrating a home win.

That wasn’t complacency. That was based on what we’ve watched from this team in most of the games this season, and on the knowledge that we have the better players and the better manager in the dugout.

All of those things are still true this afternoon. All of those things remain without doubt this afternoon. Celtic is still heading for a domestic treble this afternoon. And when that day comes, no one is going to care about what happened today.

But that doesn’t make today any better in the here and now. It doesn’t make it easier in the here and now. It doesn’t make it any more acceptable in the here and now.

The manager stood last weekend and told us how much the team had learned from Ibrox. He sat this week and told us how Ferguson’s tactics haven’t changed that much from the ones Clement was utilising against us.

I agreed with him on that, and I still agree with him on that. Clement could just as easily have gotten that result today, and that was the problem — because I don’t see real evidence that Rodgers did learn anything from Ibrox, or that this team learned anything from Ibrox. Because if they had, we would have approached that game with an entirely different attitude.

See, you can talk a good game as long as you can back it up.

But if you don’t back it up, you’re going to get questioned. And Rodgers deserves for questions to be asked here. The Ibrox club has scored three goals against us in four out of the last five games. We’ve lost two of those.

We’ve conceded three at Ibrox twice. Bad enough in itself. But we’ve also conceded three at Hampden, and now at home at Celtic Park. Brendan is not a stupid man, but he is an egotist. And if Rodgers really doesn’t understand that something isn’t working in these games, if he doesn’t get that there is a problem in these games and that there are things we need to do better in these games, then perhaps he is part of the problem after all. His performance now comes under scrutiny.

I’ll discuss the opposition in the first article tomorrow. They’re not going to be the focus of this piece, save to say that they are not a good team and they are not presently in the hands of a very good manager.

But that kind of makes the point for me in some ways. Ferguson has done nothing today that Clement didn’t do three times before him, in terms of putting three past us. Clement’s side beat us comfortably in the last league game between the two clubs. The issue isn’t that they are some brilliant side led by brilliant leaders.

The issue is that they have figured out a very simple counter to the way we play — and we haven’t altered the way we play to combat it, and so even for someone as hapless as Ferguson this is like shooting fish in a barrel.

If Rodgers wants to carry on like this, if he doesn’t want to learn that lesson, if he doesn’t want to adapt and change the way we play in certain games, if he doesn’t want to be flexible in his approach, if he wants to just keep on blaming the players and their individual mistakes for something that is now very, very clearly as much his problem as any of theirs — then at some point we’re going to suffer badly for that in a game that matters, in a moment where it really, really counts.

I love Rodgers when he’s in full-on bombastic “I am the leader, I am the big man, I am the head honcho” mode.

But it’s only amusing, and it’s only valid, when he delivers on it. And today he failed lamentably. He can blame his players if he wants, and he can talk about things that they didn’t do right, but he’s the man whose job it is to organise the side, and he didn’t do it. That performance in the first half was even worse than the one at Ibrox. They read our game easily. They countered it easily. And we got what we deserved.

There is no point in pointing to McGregor being out, or Trusty being out, or Bernardo being unavailable, or Scales not being there to step into Trusty’s shoes and us having to go with Nawrocki instead.

They did against us today what has proven effective against us previously. He spent the week telling us how much he knows about the style of play they would adopt — and he still let it catch him out cold. And that’s on him. And nobody else. Our manager is very good at taking the credit. But on a day like this, he has to be equally good at accepting his share of the blame.

That was a shambles today. And he needs some kind of plan before we go to Ibrox. Because without it, we’re going to lose another three goals, we’re going to drop another three points, and he is going to find himself at that point under more scrutiny than at any time in recent memory.

He certainly has questions to answer tonight.