Brendan Rodgers Discussion Thread

Fair play, and I completely agree with your last paragraph on that post. Just find it strange that some can't see that we looked really, alarmingly dreadful in the last 3 big matches and that he is ultimately accountable for that.

 

Seeing your best players getting sold and no quality replacements coming in will also have an impact on the players at the club. Naive not to think it will be in my opinion.

 

The board more accountable though. That’s the main crux of this.

 

Who would you have gone with out of interest?

 

You can say the football has gone stale and all the rest of it but we've been pumped out the CL by multiple sides we should be beating under different managers under similar circumstances and throughout all the failings there is only one consistent at the club and it isn't the manager

 

The spell of 6 months or so last season was undoubtedly sensational, arguably the best 6 months in terms of football of the past couple decades.

Appreciating that doesn't mean you can't find a number of legitimate faults with him as a manager. No-one doubts he's capable of getting his sides to play brilliant football; he's proven that across his career. What people also recognise, and why a good number of us have been unhappy with him throughout his tenure here, is that he's also just as capable of producing mind-numbing horseshoe football which is a dirge to watch. He also has issues with his ego which I think often have a negative impact upon how he manages his squad, while his record in the transfer market - putting board issues to the side for now - is consistently poor throughout his career.

The debate around Rodgers gets weirdly tribal. We're capable of saying aye, he is a good manager and great coach who's capable of getting his teams to play excellent football when properly motivated, while also saying he's equally capable of producing dull, uninspired football when unmotivated, which pretty consistently happens during his third season with clubs. It's also a fact imo that he's poor in the transfer market - the flipside to that is he's brilliant at developing players.

We are unfortunately going through a period where he looks unmotivated, the football is flat, and thanks to our shitshow of a board, the squad is decimated. It's a * situation. I do think, though, that with a motivated modern manager in just now our squad could be playing much, much better football, and I think most people would agree with that if they took a step back from the emotion of it all.

 

Bingo.

 

Now that you have asked.
Well documented.

I would have started Nygren on the right wing, Bernado at 6, and Shin leading the line.McGregor pushed forward to 8.

 

So why exactly are you not holding BR accountable?

Aside from Schlupp and Kuhn, the team that played that night in Munich are all still Celtic players. Obviously Jota and AJ out with injury now, but of the 13 players that featured (starting XI + 2 subs) in Munich, 11 are still Celts and 7 started on the pitch against Kairat in Glasgow, along with KT (for Schlupp), plus Scales (for Trusty), Nygren instead of Engels and Forrest instead of Kuhn, while the others were available on the bench.

That should have been enough to account for Kairat, new players or not.

Part of being a manager surely should be far more than writing a team sheet, answering some softball/predictable questions from the media, and make the odd substitution. Surely part of the remit has to be to come up with fresh ideas or identifying what oppositions are doing and being able to find something different. Again, substitutions are a totally viable part of that, but that cannot possibly be the limit of his influence that such a 'highly rated' manager is capable of. Otherwise, what the * is he getting paid £3m a year for?

I am not defending Celtic's transfer activity this summer, so don't get me wrong, but why are you giving the manager a free pass here? Maybe the manager deserves to be held accountable.

There has been no attempt to adjust formation or tactics. Before the first leg the Kaira manager clearly did his homework on Celtic, and literally copied exactly what Stephen Robinson did in setting up St M on opening day, which was working for them until Jayden Richardson had to be substituted off towards the end of the game, and when Celtic finally scored. Being so pedestrian and predictable makes it easier for teams to devise ways of being able to counteract.

In 2025, of the 6 CL games that Celtic have been involved in, Celtic has won 1, when we scraped past Young Boys, 1-0 back in January. A Young Boys team, it should be noted, who were sitting 9th in the Swiss league at the time, had lost all 6 of their previous CL games to that point and were on their 3rd manager of the season.

Not including penalty shootout in the LC Final last December, Celtic have not won an actual game of football against Sevco in over a year now.

In the Scottish Cup at Hampden, we beat St J in the SF - a team who beat Celtic just 2 weeks prior, a team who were ultimately relegated, and really, nothing more needs said about the Final against Aberdeen.

Even in the League since the turn of the year to the end of last season, Celtic took 42 points from 20 games. Both Hibs and Sevco took 40 from their last 20 games of last season. Sevco, who sacked their manager and couldn't buy a win at Ipox for like 7-8 games straight or something, and Hibs, who put together a club record undefeated run, but the resources available to them is much, much less than what BR has at Celtic, and we only narrowly edged a slightly better record than those 2 clubs.

Accountablity matter, and that 100% includes Rodgers.

 

The point I'm making is that the players there score goals regardless and over the two legs we didn't move it quick enough from back to front.
They looked well organised because we let them be organised. We face 11 men behind the ball most weeks. The point I'm trying to make is that if we had any sense of urgency (especially in that first leg) we would of cause a * of a lot more problems for them. There was no urgency at all. That was the most alarming thing.
They also had 3 of their first team out for the second leg. 3 of maybe their best as well.

 

Totally agree..

But, if you don't have the players a good coach tweeks the formation. Especially after blanking in the first leg.

We are so predictable, with our static 4-3-3. We must be one of the easiest sides to scout, analyse and then set up against. Even Martin worked out how to stop us.

For me we were crying out for something different in Kazakhstan. With no wingers of note.

Something like this maybe?

Schmeichel
Murray CCV Scales
Forrest Engels McGregor KT
Nygren Hatate
Maeda
​

A good manager adapts to the circumstances and for me Rodgers resigned himself to them.

Of course if he had better options brought in by the board, it isn't even a conversation.

 

Rodgers has not won his last six important games, it does not make good reading for the manager, and I'm a Rodgers fan.

Two against the Huns last year, Aberdeen in the Cup Final, two against Kairat and the Huns again at Ibrox.

Do you see a trend here ?.

 

For the failings in the transfer market, I agree. They don't set the team up to pass sideways though.

 

The board are the real issue but he should defo be doing more to change things and get more out of the squad. We should have had enough to beat the huns and kairat even with this sub par squad for me. Hopefully this break and what signings we've got in give us a bit of a lift and we can kick on.
* the board tho they need chased.

 

The problem with that lineup is the wingbacks don't have the legs and stamina to play that system. If you're gonna play with wingbacks they need to have pace and be able to bomb up and down all day..

KT can't, certainly no yet anyway and Forrest can't really either..

Wingbacks you could go with Engels out there and drop Hatate back one or stick Bernardo in. Left we really could've had Inamura wing back who I think would be excellent and then has the extra protection of a left sided centre half in a 3 behind him..

I really hope he does try and change formations now. We don't have the quality but having kept as many as we have, we do that the quantity and options..

Donovan, Simpson Pusey, Trusty to come back, Bernardo, McCowan, Yang, all the new boys, Yamada, Kenny, Iheanacho..

There's gonna need to be plenty of mixing about if boys are to get game time, and i can't see how he does it just playing the same 4-3-3..

 

Was so proud of him and the team after that tie no doubt about it. First 6 months or so of the season I loved watching us every week as well.

But it is a concerning factor that his football tends to go stale about the 3 year period. We are not the only set of fans to say this either. To set up against the huns like he did for 3 games in a row was utterly madness and just had the arrogance of someone who thought, * tactical tweaks against them we should be beating these regardless. There's no excuse for that for me.

Already gone into the CL playoff so I won't bring that up again.

I do appreciate that this summer window has been appaling and there are factors that come into play for why the side aren't playing the same as last year but to say that he can't take any sort of blame either is strange for me.

 

Hence the frustration from myself and others. The only guy who couldn't see that we need/needed to change things up, or he could but stubbornly refused to, which is also not acceptable.

The board have made his job hard, he then made it harder for himself by doing exactly what his counterparts knew he would.

 

We needed a marquee signing, a proven attacking talent, in before the qualifier. We never got it and thats on desmond