‘NOT THE WAY I WORK’
When you have put your imprint on a club as indelibly as Brendan Rodgers has at Celtic over the past 17 months, then it’s easy to see why you don’t feel any pressing need for one signature result to add to your CV.
In terms of stellar Champions League nights at Celtic Park, Rodgers has yet to record the kind of eyecatching victory which helped define the reigns of some of his predecessors as manager.
Martin O’neill had his 4-3 win over Juventus, Gordon Strachan took the scalps of Manchester United and AC Milan, while Neil Lennon topped the lot with the stunning 2-1 success over Barcelona in 2012.
Rodgers came close to adding to that list of famous triumphs last season when his team led Manchester City three times before settling for a 3-3 draw on a truly pulsating night in the east end of Glasgow.
But while he would dearly love to have the stadium rocking on the back of a victory over Bayern Munich tonight, Rodgers remains determined to see a much bigger picture in terms of his ambitions for the Celtic players under his command.
“I don’t need it,” he insisted, when asked about the pursuit of a first marquee Champions League win at Parkhead.
“We all want it. We would love to have that. But I have an inherent belief in what we do and, hopefully, we have seen in 17 months what that can do for us as a club and as a team. At this level, it is remarkably difficult to do that. That is the next step for us.
“For the players, that is what we are working towards. When it comes, you just don’t know. We want to impose our own style in a competition of this level that gets results.
“It would be a great result to beat Bayern and it gives you confidence, but you have to do more than just that, surely. It is good to get a result and good if you can perform well and it is brilliant for the supporters, but you can’t become complacent enough to think that it does you for two or three years. Youhavethenextgameandthe game after that and it doesn’t guarantee you anything. You need it to do well, but it does not guarantee you anything going forward. No chance. You just want to validate how you are working.
“My job as the leader is to think of the bigger picture, what our goals are and I am a realist. Having worked with players at that level, I know how they think, how they work and the difficulties of that. But it doesn’t take away our notion of what we want to try and do which is, as it was the minute I came in here, to get Celtic respect at the very top table.
“In last year’s competition we were able to do that and what we want to do is grow and develop that even more. It is all nice, the dreamy stuff of winning a big game and feeding off it for a couple of years, but the reality is that you have got to strive to build something and that is about sustaining what we are doing.”
“Pep Guardiola, if he is playing really exciting football , he’s not all of a sudden in one game going to sit back be pragmatic. That’s not what he believes, it’s not how he works. And that’s not how I work”
BRENDAN RODGERS
Rodgers’ holistic approach to managing Celtic was evidenced again on Sundaywhen,unscheduled,hedecided to take a hands-on role when the