This Summer sees the return to
action of two David Brents; while Ricky Gervais resumes his role as the
amicably awful office manager from The
Office in the one-off Life on
the Road, the spiritual personification of Brentology Brendan Rodgers
returns to football management with my club, Celtic. His time in the Premier
League with Swansea and Liverpool was a proverbial rollercoaster, which
established a managerial legacy of impressive pragmatism and fluid, attacking
football, but will be perennially marred by Liverpool’s title charge
literally slipping out his grasp through, arguably, complete misfortune. The
baggage of perceived narcissism and ludicrously inane soundbites also sullies
what is an objectively strong resume. Conversely, his occasional lapses into
caricature belies his sincerity and directness, a refreshing anecdote to the decaffeinated corporatism of modern football discourse. While his enigmatic
character certainly promises off-field entertainment and drama in Scottish
football next season – corroborated of course by the re-emergence of our city
rivals from their murky, lower-league tomb – his on-field record is intractably
the basis of such inspired optimism in the Celtic support.
Let’s be unequivocally clear; the
signing of Rodgers as manager exhibits not only a remarkable coup for Celtic
and Scottish football, but a laudable and bluntly necessary statement of intent
from the Celtic board following a year of manifest disappointment, universal
dissatisfaction, and the genuine fear of regression. While rumours circulate
that the sly jibes from Rangers executives following our dismal Scottish Cup
semi-final defeat was the principal stimulant for contacting Rodgers, the
context is largely irrelevant. He’s here, that’s what matters; regardless of
the insipid and uninformed analysis vomited up by deluded Talksport
anglocentrists and 5 Live Neanderthals. Paralleled with the “Moneyball” lite
appointment of Ronny Deila two years ago, Rodgers represents a marquee victory,
an achievement reflected in the reportedly substantial surge in season ticket
sales. Half an hour after Rodgers’s appointment was confirmed my dad messaged
me affirming that he’d decided to renew, an apt synecdoche of thousands of
disillusioned fans suddenly enlightened. We needed a spark, badly, and boy did
we get one. Celtic fans are enormously excited about hiring such a high-profile
figure, and the natural publicity his stature brings to the club. While the
reputed £15 million transfer budget remains intangible, Rodgers’s singular
signing whiffs of an unexpectedly dogged ambition, on a scale not seen in at
least a decade, since the likes of Bellamy and Juninho were brought in for
O’Neill’s final season. Incidentally, surely Rodgers symbolises the most ubiquitous
figure to come to Scottish football since O’Neill himself?
Ignoring that estranged bugbear
at the back of my mind that his tenure could prove disastrous, I spend much of
my free (and work) time theorising how Rodgers’s team will shape up. There’s a
fantastic, in-depth exploration of our potential structure on TicTactic, which
I’ve linked to below[1],
which suggests validly that Rodgers will implement his archetypal 4-3-3
formation. His quintessential style invokes hard-working wingers, overlapping
full-backs and a dynamic midfield trio who flit from attack to defence
instantaneously. A consolidation of Deila’s pressing, intensively direct game with
a more sophisticated possession aesthetic will allow laborious ballplayers like
McGregor – whose recent move to a deep-lying central midfield role is fruitfully
redolent of Samaras’s switch from striker to winger under Lennon – and Armstrong
(assuming both Biton and Johansen leave) to thrive, while Tierney and Janko effortlessly
eschew the required full-back vitality. In my opinion, supposing 4-3-3 is our
adopted preliminary tactic, the real position of concern is left-wing.
Mackay-Steven isn’t good enough, and while I’d love to see Christie start
regularly it would evidently be a case of shoehorning. A left winger, a
target-man alternative to Griffiths, and some defensive backup should ideally
be our transfer priorities; that along with rigorous trimming of our hideously
bloated squad. With Rodgers’s record of progressing younger players delicately
but meaningfully, perhaps I’m most excited about what he can do with the likes
of Christie, Tierney, Janko, Roberts, and our schoolbus-load of academy
promise. These are players with great potential; and while a few grew
demonstrably under Deila, a few chronically stagnated, so Rodgers’s
relationship with these youngsters will be a particularly interesting narrative
to follow.
Besides his football, Rodgers –
although principally a Sheffield Wednesday fan – comes from a devoutly Celtic
family, and has a resolute respect for some of our most beloved club legends;
his reverential, touching comments about Tommy Burns probably the most
palpable. Dissimilar from the traditional and contentious “Celtic men” who so
ardently divide the support – men who are undoubtedly fans of the club, but men
overshadowed by their lack of managerial credibility and the pervasive musk of
ultimate self-interest – in that he never played for the club or explicitly
affiliated himself with us previously beyond his backstory. In amalgamating his
fundamentally Celtic heritage with his pedigree for attacking football and
developing homegrown players, he symbolises the hypothetically ideal Celtic
manager. Above all else he understands the significance of managing Celtic.
This is a club with an inherent politics and communalism to it – with an ideological
identity that extends far beyond football – that it is utterly imperative our
manager integrates with. Rodgers seems to not only appreciate this, but revel
in it.
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