Strong Serg towards Livi
PAULO SERGIO has made another attempt at a managerial return to Scotland after joining the race to succeed David Hopkin at Livingston.
Hopkin quit the Lions after leading them into the Premiership as he rejected an offer from the West Lothian outfit.
Now former Hearts boss Sergio is keen to speak to the club about taking over for the new season with first-team coach David Martindale in charge of football affairs.
The Portuguese led the Jambos to Scottish Cup glory with a 5-1 final win over Hibs in 2012.
The 50-year-old was keen to replace Ian Cathro – who was axed by the Jambos at the start of last term – and applied for the Dundee post before Neil McCann came in.
Rodgers didn’t name names but the punters who watched Celtic week-in, week-out would have known who he was talking about.
In truth, those boys will know themselves and the manager’s words would have shuddered through their minds.
Let’s put Europe aside as the manager wasn’t talking about that. As Rodgers said, Celtic are miles from the top level on the continent.
It’s the domestic front he was discussing. Three trophies or not, Rodgers is demanding more and it’s hard to argue there were a few who got nowhere near the heights of their first season and the Invincibles run.
No one apart from Scott Brown really did themselves justice all of the time and there were occasions when many of them looked off the pace in certain matches.
But James Forrest, Tom Rogic, Callum McGregor and Kieran Tierney all escape criticism for me.
Same for Olivier Ntcham and Odsonne Edouard given it was their first season at Parkhead.
Moussa Dembele didn’t fire all of the time but much of that was down to injury and a saga around the time of the January transfer window which I didn’t really feel was of his making.
That’s a story for another time and given there’s a good chance he’ll leave this summer it makes this discussion less of an issue for him.
Scott Sinclair, for one, was a huge disappointment. Rodgers tried to dress up his displays with statistics at one point but the fact he started leaving
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him out of big games by the end of term tells you all you need to know.
It can’t have been easy to follow up a first season when he won every Player of the Year Award going but the drop off was staggering.
Stuart Armstrong was another who didn’t get near it. The impressive figure who finished the first Treble season went missing, although injuries again played a role. If he’s going to stay, and that’s a big if with no contract signed, he needs to get it going because Ntcham has gone past him in the pecking order at the base of the midfield and McGregor and Rogic are away in the distance when it comes to the No.10 role.
I’m a huge fan of Leigh Griffiths but he needs to stay fit and be available more often.
If he does, he’ll score goals because