STERLING’S SALUTE FOR THE CELTS
City star sought out Rodgers to rave about Tierney and strength of Celtic
AFTER playing a dynamic role in a breathless 95-minute Champions League epic, Raheem Sterling paid Brendan Rodgers a visit. The tone of the conversation suggests it was something of a relief that the journey to see his former Liverpool manager was not disrupted by the hassle of Kieran Tierney tracking him through Celtic Park’s corridors.
‘I spoke at length to young Raheem,’ said Rodgers. ‘He obviously knows how I work anyway and knew it wasn’t going to be an easy one. But he just couldn’t believe the noise. And afterwards he came in and said: “What a team you’ve got”.
‘He couldn’t believe how young Tierney was, as well. It was a great battle between two young players. Raheem is only 21 himself and won’t be 22 until December. But KT has just turned 19. I thought both those young players were outstanding. KT is developing outstandingly well. So City were very complimentary about ourselves.’
Sterling split the Celtic defence to score one of Manchester City’s three equalisers in the draw on Wednesday, but only after he was credited with an own goal for the deflection that took teenager Tierney’s strike past Claudio Bravo in one of the fiercest exchanges of a frenetic first half.
Rodgers acknowledged there may be a rematch at Wembley next month when Tierney and Sterling could clash in World Cup qualifying action, depending on how their national teams set up.
Still, the £49million star departed thankful that it isn’t every week his club team are confronted by the intensity brought from the first whistle to last by Tierney and his Celtic colleagues who — according to defender Erik Sviatchenko — created a seldomwitnessed ‘stress factor’ for Pep Guardiola’s City.
The test being relished by Rodgers is maintaining the relentless nature of these performances throughout the season in both domestic and European matches, while ensuring the participants do not wilt. Rodgers explained: ‘Our training is tapered in order to maximise what they bring into a game. My physiologist Glen (Driscoll) does a terrific job. There is a relationship between medicine/sports science and our football philosophy. ‘So each day the training pitch size is all geared towards the next game. And it means the players are at the right level of intense physical loading going into every game. When you’re pressing high up the pitch and are being very aggressive, a lot of your game is only in half a pitch. So you’re not covering the full pitch. ‘Nobody in the team is asked to do any more or any less than anyone else. It’s the collective that allows us to work that way. And every player gives their maximum. If you’re struggling for whatever reason, you come out and another profile comes in to maintain it. ‘The commitment, intensity and belief that the players had to carry out the way we normally play into a game of that magnitude was great. ‘We’ve done that in the main in the league. And we’d worked so hard to get into the tournament, so we wanted to impose this style in the Champions League, to make an impact.
‘A hallmark of my teams has been the aggression of the start. A lot of times that can win you games. We do that well.
‘If you trace our games, you will see we score a lot of goals in the first 20 minutes. Fast starts, late goals and, under huge pressure in the last 20 minutes, we block, we fight, we do everything to get the result.
‘So there’s a mental fitness in the players that’s growing all the time. And there’s a physical fitness in them. That’s a huge thing to have in your armoury, that ability to know that when others are flagging, you can keep going.
‘If you think what City have done in the Premier League and Champions League, this up here was a world away from how comfortable they have been. Yeah, I spoke to Pep — it was the toughest game they’ve had.’
As Rodgers (left) views four more Champions League group games before Christmas in which he hopes to secure European football for Celtic in the second half of the campaign, he endorses the return of the two-week winter break in January.
Martin O’Neill credits the shutdown as a helping hand on the way to the UEFA Cup Final in 2003, after which it was removed from the Scottish football calendar.
Rodgers said: ‘It’s a really clever thing to do — to have a block of time in January where we can recover.’