Celtic shouldn’t celebrate the Invincible Treble without acknowledging the man behind it.

What brass neck some of the people surrounding Celtic have. What brazenness some inside our club have too.

Today, Celtic itself is celebrating that moment at Hampden nine years ago, when Tom Rogic put the ball in the net to win us the Invincible Treble.

It is worth contemplating properly, and in full, what Rogic’s late goal actually completed. It finished something that had never been done before in Scottish football: a clean sweep of all domestic honours without losing a single game.

That was extraordinary. That was historic. That was immortal. And the man who delivered it, of course, was Brendan Rodgers.

It is inconceivable that any other manager would have propelled that team to such an achievement. The changes he brought in, stylistically, tactically and mentally, made the difference. They were enormous in helping this club reach a level it had never reached before.

Still, Rodgers has not just critics. He has poisonous critics.

Even within our own support, there are people who refuse to acknowledge that he lifted this club to an entirely different place. Without him, there would have been no Invincible Treble, no Double Treble, no foundation for the quadruple treble, no long run of titles in the same way, no 14 from 15, no doubles and trebles piled on top of one another to the point where the trophy cabinet is bursting at the seams.

We have even overtaken the lies our rivals tell themselves.

That we have people within our own support, within our own ranks, dedicated to denigrating this guy with every breath they can muster is genuinely amazing to me.

Some of his fiercest critics acknowledge the success, but then tell us that it was not built to last. Well, we will never know, will we?

He has been at the club as manager twice, and twice he has left midway through his third season because people were doing end-runs around him. Whatever actually happened inside Celtic, one thing cannot be denied.

Rodgers brought us unparalleled levels of success.

The man knows how to build a winning team.

The number of hoops some people have to jump through to convince themselves he was some ruinous presence at Celtic Park defies belief.

Does he get credit for transfer successes? No. But failures in a transfer strategy he himself objected to? Those get laid at his door.

There are certain Celtic sites where this is now their stated version of events: last summer’s fiasco was not the fault of the board of directors, but Rodgers himself. It is a lie fit only for consumption by those with a loathing of Rodgers brimming in their hearts which is greater than their love for Celtic itself.

So that window is blamed on Rodgers when he railed against it. The window before that, which brought us to within an ace of a domestic treble, which helped get us out of the Champions League group stage and nearly past Bayern Munich, is described by those same people as a failure because Rodgers was fully in control of it, and we allegedly overpaid for our three marquee signings.

All three played a significant role in that campaign. Two of them, Auston Trusty and Arne Engels, were pivotal to the double we have just won.

We are told Rodgers did no real development of players, which will come as a great shock to Matt O’Riley and Nicolas Kuhn, amongst others; two players Rodgers got more out of than anyone before him or since.

We are told Rodgers only picks and chooses the players he wants to work with. Well, that is usually what happens when you throw rubbish at a manager and tell him to work with it. He knows exactly what has been dumped on his lap.

The idea that Rodgers will only work with the players he personally signs or personally picks, and that he spits the dummy out over all others, is absolute nonsense. The last few transfer windows have conclusively proved that.

We are told he did nothing to develop Oh Hyeon-gyu.

Absolute rubbish. Oh was signed by Ange, but Rodgers gave him more game time. We are told Rodgers binned every single player from the transfer window the year he came back. Not true. The only one of those players who was worth a damn was Yang, and Rodgers did his best to turn him into a credible footballer.

In fact, without Rodgers and his coaching team, Yang would not be a player worth keeping at this club at all. People can reject that all they want. It remains true.

Benjamin Nygren signed last summer, at a time when there was not a whole lot of quality being brought in. Did Rodgers automatically reject him?

No. He played him. Why?

Because he was capable of playing a part, and Brendan Rodgers will always work with players who are capable of playing a part.

Where are the examples of genuine talent signed in the last three windows whom Rodgers refused to give a chance, who then went on to bigger and better things?

Nobody can point to them.

The board apologist poster boy is Kwon Hyeok-kyu; he was supposedly not given a proper chance. Well, what has Kwon done since to suggest he deserved one? Shin Yamada was an embarrassing signing; where is he?

Certain people got very excited because Kwon had a handful of good games in France, and suddenly there was a suggestion we had lost out on some mercurial talent because Rodgers did not put in the work. Where is Kwon playing at the moment?

Karlsruher, in Germany’s second tier. The same league as Yamada’s on-loan club ended up playing in.

These are not players Rodgers binned for no reason.

Inamura is another one who we signed and were told Rodgers rejected without giving him an opportunity; he’s back on loan in Japan after a single Celtic appearance and it was not Rodgers who made that call. He will probably never play for Celtic’s first team again.

There is precisely zero evidence to suggest we have missed out on some stunning talents because Rodgers decided not to utilise people properly. It is proof that some people are far too desperate to build a case against the manager.

Even today, as the club celebrates the unique achievement for which Rodgers was largely responsible, without ever mentioning his name in the official release, the most anti-Rodgers of all the Celtic fan sites is running yet another article denigrating him as a failure and some kind of disaster that hit the club.

To be frank, these people should be thoroughly ashamed.

Because it is nonsense.

They sound an awful lot like Ryan Stevenson did when he preached how embarrassed Celtic should be after winning the title, describing it as a dark day for the club because some fans were on the pitch.

I don’t know about you, but my first thought upon reading that was simple.

We’ll take dark days like that all the time. I hope we have a lot more of these dark days.

I would say the same to the dwindling band of nutcases in our own support who label Brendan Rodgers a failure. A failure? With eleven trophies? I hope we have many more failures like him far into the future.

Nobody is saying Rodgers is beyond criticism. Nobody is saying every decision he made was perfect. Nobody is saying supporters have to forget how either spell ended, or the frustrations that surrounded both departures. But I choose to look at events in context and ask myself; who was vindicated in either case?

And the answer is Rodgers. We saw an equally shambolic transfer window in January this year as we did last summer; nobody blames it on Martin O’Neill.

So there is criticism, and then there is revisionism. There is criticism, and then there is poison. There is criticism, and then there is pretending that one of the most successful managers in Celtic history somehow harmed the club more than he helped it.

That is absurd. It is beneath serious people.

And it is beneath Celtic.

Celebrate Tom Rogic’s goal. Celebrate the Invincible Treble. Celebrate that perfect, impossible domestic season when Celtic swept everything before them and did it without losing once. But do not pretend it happened by magic. Do not pretend the manager was incidental. Do not pretend Brendan Rodgers was not central to it.

To celebrate the Invincible Treble without acknowledging Rodgers’ role in it, and thanking him for it, is not just petty.

It is embarrassing.

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