A DISTRACTION WE DON’T NEED

Rodgers admits that uncertainty over the future of Armstrong has come at bad time

FOR Brendan Rodgers, cautious optimism over Stuart Armstrong’s Celtic future has been replaced by a different emotion. Exasperation.

Entering the final year of his contract, the Parkhead midfielder has an offer worth an estimated £18,000-a-week on the table.

It’s a sizeable salary by Scottish football standards. By those of the working man, it’s almost unimaginable. However, compared to the wages on offer at middling English Premier League clubs like West Brom and Southampton, it’s chicken feed.

Armstrong’s agent Liam O’Donnell, who was the middle man in Andrew Robertson’s £10million move to Liverpool, knows the rewards available.

Already, Celtic supporters have begun to prepare themselves for the worst. Highly influential last season, Armstrong looked a pale shadow of his former self as a second-half substitute against Partick Thistle last Friday. The suspicion is that he wants to go.

Rodgers has maintained a regular dialogue with the 25-year-old and believes that’s not the case. Celtic want to keep him and, for now, have placed no deadline on acceptance of their offer. Nevertheless, Armstrong’s influence has waned at a critical juncture in Celtic’s season.

Ahead of a make-or-break Champions League qualifier with Astana, when Rodgers is already without Moussa Dembele, Dedryck Boyata and Erik Sviatchenko, the uncertainty surrounding another of his key players is an unnecessary distraction.

‘I can reassure the supporters that, for me, this is a player who does want to be here,’ said Rodgers. ‘He genuinely does.

‘I sense that from him, from good conversations which are very open. I feel that. It’s not the case of him not wanting to be here. I don’t believe that.

‘I just think it’s something that’s dragged on way, way too long for what, with all due respect, is a simple deal.

‘This is a simple deal, Christ, not a big multi-multi-million-pound deal.

‘This is a simple deal that should have been sorted out before the end of last season. Now it’s dragged on and on and on.’

Before and during the 1-0 win over Thistle, Rodgers detected the first signs that the situation was beginning to tell. The first indication that the speculation, uncertainty and obsessive attention on the midfielder’s future was having an impact on how he played the game.

‘Some players can do it,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve had players before like that. I had (Luis) Suarez who got through it.

‘It’s just the mechanics of the different type of person. But that’s something you have to do. No matter what’s going on with the background noise, your money is in your bank every month and every day you’ve got to perform.

‘And, if not, then it’s very simple; I don’t pick the team, the players pick the team. I can mould them and construct them to work a certain way but that’s how the game goes.’

Against Astana, then, Armstrong is highly unlikely to start. The purchase of Olivier Ntcham from Manchester City offsets the loss, the Frenchman fresh from having claimed his first goal in the Firhill clash.

The frustration for Rodgers is that things ever reached this point in the first place. Armstrong, he argues, could have signed a new deal and focused on football without fearing the chance of a move to the English Premier League had passed him by.

‘Listen, Stuart is fine,’ he said. ‘He’ll be in the squad against Astana and he’s a player I’ve really enjoyed working with.

‘That’s one of the frustrations of this, for me, because it’s such a simple deal. Six months ago, it should have been organised, sorted and done.

‘And, how modern football works, if a club wants you from the Premier League they’ll pay for you. Christ Almighty, they’ll pay for you.

‘If you’re a player up here in Scotland you don’t need to worry about signing a new deal thinking

it’s going to hold you back. The game has changed. It doesn’t work like that. ‘You can gain yourself six months’ money and still go if that’s what you want to do.

‘What worried me the other day was that I saw something in a player that I hadn’t seen from back when I first came in.

‘That is where the contract situation comes in. It is about finding that stability.

‘I read a headline about the board sorting it out. This isn’t just solely the board. There has been an offer there for a long time now which is a really, really good offer.

‘But if representatives feel there are maybe other options for him — and we haven’t had an offer — and they want to wait and wait and wait and wait to see what happens then, okay, that’s what you do. But the player suffers.’

An intelligent young man studying for a law degree, it’s natural to conclude that Armstrong just might be capable of independent thought.

That, if he really wants to stay with Celtic, his agent could be instructed tomorrow to do the deal.

‘It’s not the boy,’ countered Rodgers. ‘It’s not him.

‘If you’re paying someone to make decisions for you and who’ll gain their commission from it then, of course, that’s what you look towards.

‘Listen, most players have representatives. They are there to represent them. It is something that could and should have been done a long time ago.

‘In Stuart’s situation, I would love for him to have it resolved but, unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if that will be in the immediate future.

‘There will be reasons why, which his representatives have. But I have a feeling it might go to the very end of the transfer window.’

A goalless draw against Rosenborg at Parkhead served Celtic well in the first leg of the third qualifying round. Astana’s formidable home record in Kazakhstan would make that a risky scoreline in tonight’s match in Glasgow.

‘Ideally, you want to take the win,’ said Rodgers. ‘But the game at Rosenborg in the last round, and the game in Astana last season, shows you we can get results away.

‘I look at the spaces and how open we were last year. It was just a different team with a different idea. Mentally, it was just trying to get them through it.

‘But the team now plays in a different way and I think that will, hopefully, benefit us.

‘We’ll take that into the game with the energy of the crowd and, if we have to be patient as we might have to do, we have to be compact and take our chances when they come.’