BRENDAN’S TWILIGHT MOAN
Transfers row is same for every gaffer at Parkhead
You shouldn’t have to lose to learn. Brendan Rodgers was spot on with his assessment after the bitter disappointment of Athens.
The Celtic boss didn’t find anything new about his side as they crashed out of the Champions League but he has learned painful lessons this summer regardless of how the qualifying campaign panned out.
Rodgers might have stumbled into frustrating new territory in the 70 days of the transfer window but it will be brutally familiar to plenty.
Namely Celtic supporters and former managers.
Just ask Neil Lennon. The ex-gaffer has been busy taking Hibs on their best Euro run for donkey’s years but when he has five minutes to spare to catch up with the papers he could be forgiven for thinking he’d woken up in 2013.
Rodgers has voiced his frustration at the failure to get transfers over the e line at Parkhead but it’s the gaffer r who has changed strategy.
The club has remained the same ass it has been for a decade.
This time five years ago, Lenny hadd led Celtic to the last 16 of the Championss League and banked the club a fortune..
His reward? Victor Wanyama, Garyy Hooper and Kelvin Wilson were alll offski, there was £20million sitting in the bank and only half of it was spent on replacements.
A year on and he’d had his fill, with goalkeeper Fraser Forster the next heading to the exit for big money despite another Champions League group stage appearance.
In Lennon’s last summer he managed to bag Virgil van Dijk and Nir Bitton, with Stefan Johansen and Leigh Griff iths picked up in the January, yet folk were questioning some of the recruitment after Amido Balde, Teemu Pukki and Derk Boerrigter were brought in for about £5m. Any of this sound familiar? There was even a seldom seen centrehalf. Remember Steven Mouyokolo? Nah, not many do. It’ll be the same with Marvin Compper in a few years. The point is, while Rodgers might feel he has been banging his head on a brick wall these last few months, the folk above him are left wondering what the fuss is about.
This is how they operate. The goalposts haven’t moved – it’s the manager’s targets that have shifted.
You can’t blame Rodgers for trying to up the ante. But at the same time, there’s a reason Celtic are so stable. It might drive the punters up the wall at times but they don’t go daft because they know the Champions League qualifiers are shark-infested waters.
There are too many teams who are either a wee bit better than Celtic or marginally worse. It means apart from the bye of a first round the Hoops are running the gauntlet. An off night here, a few injuries there, and it’s curtains. See Athens for exhibit A.
It could quite easily have been Beer Sheva or Astana.
Rodgers – like every boss – is well within his rights to push for more dosh to get in the players he sees can improve the odds of qualification and making a decent fist of it if and when they get there.
But from the other side of the fence, the Celtic board have not cashed in on their top assets.
They’ve resisted big bids for Moussa Dembele, Bitton, Dedryck Boyata. They’ve ramped up the contracts of Kieran Tierney, Tom Rogic and others as part of a wage bill Lennon and Ronny Dei la could only have dreamed about. In fairness to the suits, they have tried to keep the wolves from the door to allow their manager to keep the same side together for two seasons.
It’s probably not enough for someone as fiercely ambitious as Rodgers, who sees Celtic as a club with huge potential but now perhaps one that’s too cautious to go out and fulfil it.
Good luck in shifting an entrenched ethos though.
The harsh truth for Rodgers is he’s stuck in a transfer twilight zone at Parkhead. He’s being asked to make Celtic a Champions League club on Derby County’s budget.
There are some folk panning his recruitment now as well. Sure, there’s been a fair few misses but in Dembele, Ntcham and Odsonne Edouard he has a £ 30m-plus insurance policy, chuck in the development of Tierney, and the manager could leave a legacy of over £ 60m.
Lennon eventually got bored by the domestic scene and fed up with the impossible job he faced at Parkhead on the European stage.
It’s perhaps inevitable Rodgers will eventually go the same way but the next 13 days will work out the timetable.
Back the boss with the bucks to bring to life his vision or force him to fall back into line with company policy and hope he’ll hang around long enough to prove his coaching skills can bring home the bacon on the home front again.
It all just sounds so familiar but now Hoops fans will find out if their board have learned any lessons.