Brendan Rodgers made a remark that ought to be sending shivers down the Celtic boardroom this morning.
The 1-1 tie with Kilmarnock exposed the most of Celtic’s issues for the season. It was the team’s fourth home loss in the SPFL and their third loss in four meetings against Kilmarnock. When Greg Taylor went off injured, Rodgers resorted to Alexandro Bernabei, who had only made four substitute appearances in the first half of the season and had mostly failed to make the matchday squad. Four wingers were deployed during the match, with hardly a single cut-back for strikers to work on.
The manager is expected to bring out the best in the players, most of whom contributed to the team’s domestic triple last season, regardless of any problems inside the organisation. After a week of training with the 19 players he has chosen, a manager needs to extract the maximum performance from them.
It seems that Rodgers has given up on the players he chose based on one remark from yesterday, as reported by The Scotsman:
It is not about ability or technique now, it is about mentality. It is about not letting that man go past you and having that drive and composure to play. We saw it the second half, even though we were not under great pressure we kept making it hard for ourselves.
It is not possible to address player attitude during training, and it is a very important matter.
In football, firing the manager is the easiest way to resolve these kinds of issues rather than clearing out the squad of players with long-term contracts.
If Michael Nicholson and Peter Lawwell need any encouragement to make tough choices, they only need to look across the city to observe what transpired when Michael Beale was benched prior to the conclusion of the first round of SPFL fixtures.
