Celtic Diary Monday June 12: Be Careful What You Wish For

According to the Daily Mail, and reporter Stephen MacGowan, Celtic are in face to face talks with Brendan Rodgers over a return to the post of team manager.

It’s not yet known which of Rodger’s many faces will attend the talks.

Despite his moonlight flit to Leicester, quite a few supporters want to see him return, because he had been fairly successful domestically, winning three trebles, including the Invincible season, for which he is rightly praised.

And he did modernise the facilities behind the scenes, upgrading, to say the least, the medical and training facilities.

So much so on the medical side, that if I recall correctly, quite a number of his players spent quite a lot of time there,

Then, in a fit of what could almost be decribed as temper, having failed to gain complete control of the playing side, he headed south to work on his plan to get Leiceister out of the money spinning EPL.

Which, in fairness, took him longer than he had expected, but he got there in the end.

As one of what we believe to be three candidates, Rodgers is seen as the safe bet…yeah, i know….the one who would guarantee dominance over our friends on the other side of the river.

Frankly, though, we should be aiming a little higher than remaining in pole position ahead of a club/company that has lost several first team players, for no return, and is looking to replace them with loannees and players who are out of contract at their current clubs, and , indeed, out of a first team place there.

With no money available and a rookie manager in charge, if the reason that Rodgers is favourite just around keeping them in a box they are already struggling to get out of, we need to take a long and hard look at what we want from our club.

Rodgers was out of his depth in Europe, providing some of our most embarassing results and peformances in our history, and single handedly destroying the fortress parkhead myth.

He has little eye for the future, usually becuase he’s a short term boss, and yes, i know they alla re, but at least Postecoglou left something to be built on.

There should be little concern about players following a manager whose vision they bought into, only to see him declare he had an entirely different vision for someone else.

Players do take that sort of thing into account, and those left from the forst Rodgers era, along with all the other background staff, will no doubt have given their versions of events to the more recent additions…

If Rodgers has split the support, one can only wonder how much he has split the staff.

And imagine him trying to talk a top Celtic player out of leaving for the EPL when an offer comes in, when he himself took the first offer that came along.

The players and staff  would have to get on with it if he was appointed, and they weren’t happy with it, but there would at best be a lack of enthusiasm for what they do, and at worst a complete disregard.

Enzo Maresco, who is still the talk of the ranch, was part of the team that joined the elite club of big treble winners, although i would hasten to remind any Manchester city fans that hardly remembers the second man on the moon, and even those who do would struggle to name the eighth.

There must be a serious interest in his capability to build on what is there already from the board, and that’s not surprising, given the effort put in by the board to get Celtic to a point where the club has not only a great bank balance, but a significant amount tied up in player..and other assets.

Which is why it’s strange that Celtic are looking at Rodgers when more or less any manager currently looking for work, or indeed, in work, wouldn’t seriously consider a job at a place where there is quality in the squad, money in the bank and a spot in the group stages of the champions League on offer.

Sometimes we really do let ourselves down when it comes to our own publicity.

By appointing a manager simply because he’ll guarantee keeping us ahead of “rangers ” is showing a lack of ambition that can only mean they have either brought us down to our level, or we’re trying to revive the old firm brand by keeping it relevant.

We mentioned a third candidate, although we have no idea who it is, and it may just be that whilst he is of high quality, he will be seen as a sort of compromise candidate for a board that is just as split on the issue as the fans and staff appear to be.

You’ll have heard several names, most of which have been linked to Celtic by their own agents to raise their own profile, so there’s every possibility a third name will leap out and surprise us, at around the same time he is announced as manager.

Though I would be very suspicious of any foreign types with a Lurgan accent and badly dyed ginger hair…..

On Saturday, we considered this…..

Corrupt Official 

Snap shot freeze-frame test shot of Daizen Maeda out-pacing VAR shutter speed revealed  

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