Never mind size or pace, it’s ability that really counts

TWO games played, nine goals conceded. Yeah, let’s go out on a limb and suggest that Brendan Rodgers still has some work to do on the Celtic defence. Conceding two to Inverness Caledonian Thistle in the Highlands yesterday, dropping a pair of points in the process, should arguably cause as much concern as the seven shipped in Catalonia last midweek. If there is such a thing as a lesson to be learned from that battering in the Nou Camp, meanwhile, perhaps it is in studying the words of one player who — introduced at half-time — kicked the entire Barcelona performance up a gear. ‘What I do in the stadium, I did on the school playground,’ is how Andres Iniesta describes his footballing philosophy, the little glow-worm with the best vision in the game adding: ‘What I did at 12, I still do now.’ The words of Iniesta (right), a player nurtured and educated through Barcelona’s famous La Masia academy, reveal a great truth about talent development. When you find a genius, don’t try to tear him down and rebuild him in a more conventional image. Iniesta’s words came to mind recently when, in discussion with an experienced Scottish coach still working on the frontline of senior football, said veteran brought up the idea that we had all been temporarily hoodwinked by what he called ‘small player syndrome’. This had now been ditched, mercifully he said, for an acceptance that football is a game for men. Hardrunning athletes who can take a hit and give one right back. Without disagreeing with the idea that football requires dynamism and power, the hackles do start to rise slightly when people in football equate strength with stature. Every one of the ‘wee men’ around whom Barca and then Spain built their revolution could probably lay you out with a single punch — or throw a Scottish centre-half clear across the room; nobody reaches the top without the kind of superhuman athleticism that separates elite sports people from mere mortals. The worst thing that could happen to Scottish football, however, is for coaches to return to the old fixation with either lumbering bulk or just searing pace… and to hang with ability on the actual ball. You know, the thing that goes in the net. With worrying regularity, if you’re Dorus de Vries. That’s working out well, isn’t it?