RODGERS IS RELENTLESS

Celtic boss won’t slow down in mission for more success

BRENDAN RODGERS read the news last week. Kevin Austin, the former Swansea defender, had died from pancreatic cancer. He noticed it because Austin had played for the Welsh club Rodgers once managed. But there was something else. ‘The same age as me,’ says Rodgers. ‘He was 45. He was only diagnosed last year. It’s a short life.’

A sense of mortality is a recurring theme in conversations with the Celtic manager. It is bound to be. His mother died when she was 53. His father succumbed to throat cancer when he was 59. Their loss was devastating for Rodgers and his four brothers. Sometimes, he says, when he was Liverpool boss he would fly back to Northern Ireland alone so he could sit by their graves.

Those family tragedies made him feel vulnerable for a while but that has gone now, he insists. Instead, they have made him determined to seize the day. Rodgers is not a manager who wants to stand still.

Last week marked the end of his first decade as a boss and he has much he wants to achieve in the next 10 years. Life is short, as he says, and he is in a hurry.

He still thinks of himself as a young manager, he says. He started at Watford when he was 35. In a hurry, even then. He says he wants to be a manager for another 20 years. He says that since the night he went to his first League Managers’ Association dinner in 2008 and saw some older bosses being recognised for taking charge of 1,000 games, that has been his target.

‘I looked at them being presented with their mementoes,’ he says, ‘and I thought: “Wow, what an achievement that is, what a sign of not just being a good manager but of resilience and of succeeding”. I’m on 456 or something like that now but from that evening on, that was my target: to get to 1,000 games.’

He apologises for the waistcoat he is wearing as if he thinks it looks a little too dapper and leads the way out of the conference rooms where he and the Aberdeen boss Derek McInnes have been taking it in turns to talk to groups of journalists at a press day ahead of the Betfred Cup Final. He walks through the foyer at Hampden Park, where guests are starting to arrive for a corporate function, and up the stairs to a suite.

It looks out over the pitch where today he will become only the second manager in Scottish football history after Walter Smith to win seven consecutive trophies if Celtic beat Aberdeen.

Since he arrived in the summer of 2016, Rodgers has won every domestic trophy available. Today’s match marks the first leg of an attempted ‘Treble Treble’.

His time in Scotland reads like the resume of a man with no time to waste. His Celtic have shown no mercy. They win a trophy and move on to the next one. There is no let-up. There is a relentlessness about them that is almost unmatched in the history of the game north of the border. It is a reflection of the attitude of the man at the helm.

Steven Gerrard’s arrival as Rangers manager has changed the dynamic in Scottish football and Rangers will go top if they beat Hearts today. Rodgers is not unduly concerned about the impact the man who was his captain at Liverpool when they came so close to winning the title is having. He does not give the impression he thinks his hegemony is under threat.

‘When you’re in Glasgow, there’s only one winner,’ he says. ‘You have to make sure you’re on the winning side and I’ve done okay. All you can do is set your own standard in terms of your own team and club, and you do your very best. You can’t really worry about what’s over your fence. You can’t. I focus on Celtic.

‘Stevie will be the fourth Rangers manager since I have been up here. He’s taken his first job at a big club. I know how he’s made, Stevie. He was a top-class player, one of the best of his generation. It was absolutely brilliant for me, as a young manager, to work with him. It would have been great if it was a bit earlier but he was brilliant for me in my time in there.

‘I want him to do well in management. He has had the courage to take on the responsibility of coming into this side of it. As a player of his class, when you have got to dig deep and you have looked within yourself, you have always found the answers.

‘When you’re a manager, you’ve got to look at players who aren’t at that kind of level.’

It sometimes feels as if Rodgers is working in a gilded cage in Scotland. His Celtic team are utterly dominant domestically but a lack of investment in the summer and the failure to qualify for the Champions League group stage strengthened the feeling that Rodgers already has his nose pressed up against a glass ceiling.

Against that, Celtic’s win at Rosenborg on Thursday night means they only need to avoid defeat at

‘WHEN YOU’RE IN GLASGOW THERE IS ONLY ONE WINNER. YOU HAVE TO BE ON THE WINNING SIDE AND I’VE DONE OKAY... I FOCUS ON CELTIC’

home to Red Bull Salzburg later this month to qualify for the knockout stage of the Europa League, which would be another sign that Rodgers’ side is starting to move through the gears after a relatively slow start to the season.

Rodgers says that he loves working at Celtic. He says, too, that he loves his life in Scotland. There is no reason to doubt him on either count. But he is still ambitious and he is still a man in a hurry and logic says that sooner rather than later, his achievements at Celtic Park combined with his work at Liverpool and Swansea will attract suitors who will try to tempt him away.

Perhaps it is because he is acutely aware of time passing that it meant something to Rodgers when his highly-rated assistant coach Chris Davies pointed out last week that it was the 10th anniversary of his time as a manager. The low point, he says, was a moment in October 2009 during his ill-fated tenure at Reading. The high point, though, was a surprise.

‘It was the Play-off final between Swansea and Reading in 2011,’ says Rodgers. ‘A year earlier, I was out of work. I was in Holland, watching my son who was due to play a match on the Sunday evening. I was in my hotel room that Sunday afternoon and watching Blackpool v Cardiff in the 2010 Play-off final.

‘The rain was pouring down at Wembley and I saw Ian Holloway, the Blackpool manager, soaked on the touchline and I thought he was in the best place you could ever be in as a manager: at Wembley in front of 90,000 and he had just been promoted to the Premier League.

‘A year later, I was standing on the Wembley touchline with a few minutes to go, 4-2 up in front of 90 odd thousand and it started to rain. It took me back to where I was a year ago. I thought: “Football is such a great game”.

‘That gave me all sorts of emotions. It was the last game my father was ever at. It is a defining game, the Play-off final. We were the first Welsh team ever to make it to the Premier League and then I was able to take my ideas into the most competitive league. That was a very important game in my career.

‘Looking back, the low point was quite funny. I had had a difficult time at Reading. We had lost to West Brom. Taken the lead and lost the game 3-1. The following midweek, we were playing QPR at Loftus Road. For the first time, I have gone to change how I’ve played. I thought we’d go 4-4-2, stay solid, stay strong. It wasn’t going great so that’s how I set the team up.

‘By the time the second half came around at Loftus Road, we weren’t doing great. There was no identity. We were 3-1 down. And the QPR fans started singing: “You’re getting sacked in the morning” and then the Reading fans joined in, so now I was stood there and I had the whole ground singing it.

‘After the game, I was on the bus and I said: “It may happen to me again but I tell you what, if it does, it will be the way I want to play. So if you are going to go down here Brendan, let’s go down with your own vision and beliefs”. So I look back at that experience and it was not good at the time, but with experience you see the funny side of it and you grow from it.’

Rodgers thinks about the next 10 years and what they may bring. It must still be an ambition to win the Premier League? And the Champions League? To work abroad, perhaps? Rodgers says he tries to think only of the satisfaction he will gain in improving players and getting teams to play the kind of football that will entertain the fans.

‘I’m really excited about the next 10 years,’ he says. ‘The game is always changing and evolving. I look back to Barcelona and the first Dream Team. Pep (Guardiola) has virtually got Dream Team No2 (at Manchester City), so that way of playing and working is still the same.

‘You have to be ready to move with the times because each year, you move away from the players in terms of age. But you will always be working with that age bracket of 16 to 35, so you have to stay relevant. The world is changing, so you have to have empathy for that while trying to instil the beliefs and values that are important to you.

‘You have to future-proof yourself. You are thinking ahead. What does the game look like over the coming years? You have to be ready to change that. The game gets quicker. Technology sees to that. And the sports science. Better pitches. The best teams were attacking teams that played attacking football, aggressive football and that is the same.

‘The management of players over the next 10 years will change again because they have more things to deal with. Now players are aware within a matter of minutes after a game what the views of millions of people are. You have to ensure young players stay focused and calm and help them deal with that pressure.

‘My target was always to try to be at the leading edge of development, both with individuals and a team. At some point, I would want to be abroad, working out of my comfort zone. I left school with no qualifications so my life has always been based on experiences. I have always looked to the next experience.

‘This is an incredible club and my boyhood team and I’m loving it. But there will be a point where it’s about the next experience.’