Rodgers v Celtic’s board – the sequel

In the aftermath, after the last whistle sounded on Celtic’s dreary 0-0 draw with Kairat Almaty in the first leg of their Champions League play-off and when the strains of “sack the board” had died away, Brendan Rodgers sat down to talk.

There are times when a post-match news conference is far more box office than the 90 minutes that preceded it – and rarely has that been more true than in the east end of Glasgow on Wednesday.

Rodgers’ team had been largely awful: flat, uninspiring and unthreatening. This tie is in the balance now in a way that few people had expected.

The Celtic manager had two ways to go – bite his tongue about the holes in his squad and his board’s pedestrian attempts to fill them, or continue down the road he’s been on for a while now, doubling down on the message.

He chose the latter – and in many ways it was riveting and illuminating about where he is at with Celtic.

Where are the new signings? He said he could not answer that, meaning that it is a question for those above him – which, of course, it is.

But those above him do not speak about such things, so he is living a Groundhog Day existence on that front. Round and round he goes, where are the players, nobody knows.

He was asked, rather pointedly, if he thought the fans should have to accept the way the club is being run, the way they entered a key Champions League qualifier still not having replaced a departed icon Kyogo Furuhashi – who left for France in January – Nicolas Kuhn, a 21-goal winger who left in the summer for Como and Jota, the classy winger who will be out injured until next year.

“That’s not for me to answer,” said Rodgers. The subtext being, ‘go ask somebody who can answer it’.

As the questions came, the manager met each one with some loaded language. He said it had been pretty clear for some time that Celtic were short of players and needed to do more in the market.

“It’s the lightest we’ve been in key areas of the pitch,” he remarked about their preparation for a tie of such magnitude, a £40m head-to-head with a team they were hot favourites to put away.

On his watch, Arne Engels was signed for £11m, Auston Trusty was brought in for £6m and Paulo Bernardo cost about £3.5m.

All three failed to make the starting line-up against Kairat. Adam Idah cost a further £9m and it would be hard to argue Celtic got value there.

Should Rodgers’ team have played a whole lot better even allowing for the lack of new blood? Unquestionably.

And now? That Champions League and the loot that goes with it is in more danger than it ought to be. That is not solely down to a lack of recruitment. If Celtic do not make it through to the league phase, there are questions for everybody at the club.

At one point of the night, the cameras panned to the stands and picked out some senior men at the club.

There was Michael Nicholson, the stoic chief executive. There, also, was Peter Lawwell, the chairman who is no longer pulling the strings at the club in the way he did for so many years.

There, too, were others high up in the hierarchy, non-executives feeling the heat of the Celtic fans.

Dermot Desmond, the majority shareholder and the key figure at the club, was nowhere to be seen. You have to wonder what his reaction will be when he hears of Rodgers’ comments.

Everything that Rodgers said is going to increase fan frustration with the board. His point about there being “only so many ways I can dress up” that the transfer business has not been done was a stark one.

It was all a commentary on the way things are: a veiled criticism and a challenge.

And there were cryptic words on the singing of ‘sack the board’: “What I do know is, over many years, ‘sack the board’ usually means ‘sack the manager’. It’s normally the manager that goes when that starts to be sung.”

It was a strange comment. What did he mean by that? That he would lose his job before any board member?

He did not elaborate, but it could be interpreted as another reflection on a troubled relationship with some of the people above him at Celtic.

He has been in this movie before, of course – and now he is in the sequel.

In 2018, during his first spell as Celtic manager, he was asked what would happen if the club, in his eyes, stopped pushing forward. “Yeah, my job is done then,” he replied. “Terminado. Gone.”

Earlier this month, there was a reprise of those sentiments. “I’m not good at maintaining anything. If it’s just something to maintain, I’m not the manager for Celtic.”

There is still time for Celtic to recruit in this window and put these issues to bed. There is a ton of money in the bank and quite a few parts of the pitch that need addressing.

They need at least one quality winger, a new centre-forward, a back-up to Kieran Tierney at left-back and, depending on the severity of Alistair Johnston’s hamstring injury, possibly a new right-back also.

They have the spending power to make the current issues disappear.

Rodgers said that 0-0 on the night wasn’t great but offered hope of progression in Tuesday’s return.

He reminded folk that he was in this position before in a Champions League qualifier when, in 2017, his team drew 0-0 at home against Rosenborg but then beat them 1-0 away in the second leg.

That was the example he chose to use to lift the spirits, but there is another way of looking at the kind of situation Celtic are in right now.

Rodgers said nothing of the qualifier the following season against AEK Athens. It finished 1-1 in Glasgow and was followed by a 2-1 loss in Greece and an exit from Europe’s biggest stage and a cautionary tale.