Re-signing Taylor may not be Celtic’s best bet, but those slagging Rodgers offer nothing.

There are certain corners of Celtic cyberspace where Brendan Rodgers is not everyone’s favourite man. I understand that that will forever be the case. I understand that, for many people, he blotted his copybook when he chose to leave Celtic the first time in the manner that he did, and for some, there is no forgiving that.

They forget, I think, that this is a mercenary business.

They forget that Lawwell held far too much sway at the time, and that the manager had a choice; to stay and be undermined, or to go. And he chose not to hang around whilst other people gambled with his destiny. Faced with similar circumstances, you or I might have made the same decision.

That section of our support will always find something to criticise Rodgers over. And lately, one of the subjects over which he’s getting whipped is the signing policy. This is not new, of course, but the manner in which the criticism is coming certainly is.

Rodgers has stepped up our signing policy. We are now going after more high-profile players, at a higher cost. For some people, that is just not how it’s supposed to be.

Sometimes on this site, we give the impression that the only people who are criticising the Rodgers signing policy are the media. This is far from the truth. There is a section of our own fanbase which does not believe that we’ve done the right thing in terms of buying certain players. But for most, their objections are focused around the idea that some of the guys we’ve spent money on aren’t worth the sums we paid.

Their problem is not with the strategy that signed them.

But there is another section of the Celtic support which is concerned about the strategy itself. They don’t like that Brendan is spending big money on footballers now. They would rather we went back to the “project player” signing policy that, in their opinion, has served us well for a long time.

Now, let’s be honest. There are ways in which that policy has served us well. But there are ways in which it has not. It has landed us, over the years, with an awful lot of subpar footballers who we could not possibly find any use for.

It second-guesses the manager’s wants and needs. And those who have simultaneously praised Ange for his signing policy and criticised Rodgers for the one he has produced are largely ignoring a rather inconvenient fact.

Ange Postecoglou did not pursue the policy they seem to think he did. Ange’s policy in signing players was to sign the best players he could for the positions he needed filled. It is as simple as that.

I know that, for some people, this is a revolutionary idea—but when the manager is designing the system, when the manager is designing it to do a certain thing and play a certain way, it is only right and proper that that manager is the one who signs the players. It is only right that his vision is the one that is followed.

Where these people are being entirely disingenuous is in pushing the idea that Ange’s entire philosophy as Celtic manager was tied in with Celtic’s own philosophy, and that there was no difference between the way he wanted to do things and the way others at the club did. There are two critical pieces of evidence which suggest that this is nonsense.

The first of those is that the scouting department did not recommend Kyogo, Maeda, Iwata and all the others he signed from Asia. They were the manager’s own choices, and that suggests that he had total control. The Celtic signing policy that these people are so enamoured with would never have allowed us to sign Aaron Mooy. And perhaps not even Joe Hart. But this was the manager operating as architect.

Yes, there were some signings that the Celtic scouting department recommended. Absolutely, there were. And at that point, Ange’s philosophy and theirs matched each other. Ange needed a player in a certain position, and some of the options that he was presented with suited his style of play. But the primary thing to remember is that this was a classic example of the manager hand-picking every single piece himself. And if the pieces offered to him weren’t going to do the job, he went out and found ones that would.

The main concern some of these people seem to have is that there is no resale value in the squad. But that is nonsense, of course. There is resale value in this squad, and there’s plenty of it. Yet that’s not Rodgers’ primary duty.

The job of a Celtic manager is to assemble the best team he can—and not just in the starting XI, but to put together a squad that is capable of doing big things. That is where both Ange and Brendan have been exceptional.

The second piece of evidence against the thesis that Ange was more in tune with the Celtic philosophy than Rodgers is found in the players we signed in Ange’s third and fourth windows. The standard of them drops markedly—and that’s when the Celtic scouting department was basically picking in total control.

A number of them didn’t play more than a handful of games. A number were not trusted by the manager to do anything meaningful on the pitch. Sead Haksabanovic is one player I do not believe, for a second, that Ange had any use for. This was, of course, during Mark Lawwell’s disastrous spell as head of football operations.

The current complaint is over Greg Taylor and Celtic offering him a new deal. One website today published a piece attacking Rodgers because he wants to keep Taylor at the club as well as having Tierney here.

Apparently, having a very good backup for Tierney is somehow sacrilege, somehow going against the grain, somehow some kind of breach of club policy.

But the Rodgers policy is to make Celtic as strong as possible. And we need a good backup to Kieran Tierney because of Tierney’s injury issues.

The writer is proposing that we ditch keeping Greg Taylor. Now, I think we should move past Greg Taylor. I think we can do better than Greg Taylor. But that doesn’t mean we should sign some development player or promote one from the Lowland League squad, and try to turn him into Greg Taylor over three or four years just so we can sell him on, which is precisely what we’re being urged to do.

I want the strongest possible squad, with the strongest possible starting XI and the best backups for those players that we can find—so that if one of them drops out of the team, his replacement does not degrade the quality of the starting lineup.

And I don’t lie awake at night sweating over the fact that Brendan Rodgers appears to want the same thing. I’m comforted by that fact. I’m comforted by that knowledge. Rodgers knows that if Tierney drops out of the team for any reason, for any length of time, he needs someone who can step up to this level.

What do we know about Greg Taylor? That he can do exactly that. Oh he might look short of the level of quality Tierney will give us in Europe, but as far as the week to challenge goes, he can meet it comfortably.

So, the idea of signing Greg Taylor to a new deal, while it wouldn’t be my first choice, is a vastly better one than putting some development player in there, when we may have to rely on that guy for extended periods of time.

I know that part of this is pique—and that some of it is because certain members of the board never wanted Rodgers back in the first place, and some of our fan media reflects their views, and also because Rodgers almost certainly has the blood of Mark Lawwell on his hands. Rodgers rejected almost every signing that Lawwell made. Rodgers refused to consider them first-team-ready footballers.

But that is the manager’s right. That is the manager exercising his own judgement. And whose judgement should he trust if not his own?

The anger seems to be that Rodgers has changed the policy he was brought in to work within. But what is the policy? What is the basic function of it? I always thought the policy was designed explicitly to make Celtic as strong a team as we can possibly be.

And we are a strong team. We do have immense strength and depth. For the first time in a long time, we got to the Champions League playoffs. We gave a good account of ourselves. We restored a bit of our confidence in Europe—and a little bit of our reputation.

All those years that we failed to make those strides—who wants to take responsibility for them? I blame the previous policy for that. I blame a policy of spending low sums of money on unproven footballers. Is it a coincidence that when we started to spend properly on experience, when we went that grade higher in the pursuit of our footballers, we started to restore the club’s confidence in itself—on the pitch, where it matters most, at the top level in Europe?

Of course it isn’t.

When people talk about how much Champions League experience there is now in this Celtic team, why is that being played by some people as a negative? Would they prefer we started with eleven projects? Probably. They would prefer it that way. But fans would get no real satisfaction out of watching us being humiliated.

And let me say again: I would go out and look for someone better than Greg Taylor. I would not give Greg Taylor another contract because I think there are better footballers out there who we could afford.

But that is an entirely different argument from the one being made by those who think we should sign some development player or promote someone from the youth academy—someone who was playing in the Lowland League this season, in a campaign where we didn’t even win the Lowland League.

And I think those options are absolutely unacceptable.

We certainly need someone like Taylor. Someone with experience. Someone who will quickly fit into the system and the style. Someone we can absolutely trust when the going gets tough—and if something goes wrong with Tierney.

So I cannot work out why anyone would not be in favour of a deal like this. It makes nothing but good sense.

Even if I don’t agree with it, I can understand the thinking behind it.

On the other hand, I cannot understand using this as a stick to beat Rodgers—a man who simply wants us to be the best we can be … or maybe I do. Rodgers has been in the crosshairs since he got back, for whatever reason, and this is just another front on which to attack the guy who is getting so much success.