Brendan Rodgers faces Celtic puzzle Walter Smith once had to solve as boss admits Champions League leaving its scars.
UEFA: Walter Smith once had to solve as boss admits Champions League leaving its scars…
It’s been a damaging Champions League campaign for Celtic but Rodgers insists battle scars are part of the parcel of playing for a big club
Walter Smith had a theory which, for obvious reasons, he didn’t like discussing in public.
But the truth is there were some seasons when the former Rangers great could hardly wait for the Champions League to end so he could turn his attention back to winning domestic titles – and repair the damage European football’s big boys had wreaked on the self-esteem of his players.
The money was good for the club. But the constant batterings doled out on the pitch were always Smith’s priority concern.
Now Brendan Rodgers finds himself on the other side of the city, facing the exact same set of problems. One point from a possible 15 in Group A has left Rodgers and his players anchored to the foot of the section, eliminated from Europe with a game to spare.
And wondering if they might ever solve a puzzle that has been baffling the club for more than a decade, when they last won at home in UEFA’s premier event.
Brendan Rodgers faces Celtic puzzle Walter Smith once had to solve as boss admits Champions League leaving its scars
It’s been a damaging Champions League campaign for Celtic but Rodgers insists battle scars are part of the parcel of playing for a big club.
Walter Smith had a theory which, for obvious reasons, he didn’t like discussing in public.
But the truth is there were some seasons when the former Rangers great could hardly wait for the Champions League to end so he could turn his attention back to winning domestic titles – and repair the damage European football’s big boys had wreaked on the self-esteem of his players. The money was good for the club. But the constant batterings doled out on the pitch were always Smith’s priority concern.
Now Brendan Rodgers finds himself on the other side of the city, facing the exact same set of problems. One point from a possible 15 in Group A has left Rodgers and his players anchored to the foot of the section, eliminated from Europe with a game to spare. And wondering if they might ever solve a puzzle that has been baffling the club for more than a decade, when they last won at home in UEFA’s premier event.
Sunday’s defeat at Kilmarnock cast a shadow over Rodgers’ media duties on Tuesday as he looked forward to one last crack of the whip at home to Feyenoord.
He has spent the last few days going over it on the tapes, pointing out to his players where they went so badly wrong and allowed themselves to be bullied at Rugby Park.
And he did it while dealing with a chest and throat infection, having spent an abject afternoon in the driving Ayrshire rain. He said: “The great value in it is about learning. You have to learn from it. There are players coming into the team and players in the team who haven’t played a great deal.
“So this is a great learning for everyone really. When you play for a top club you are paid to deal with those moments of pressure. But that poise for some reason left our play. When you don’t play how we want to play you can come unstuck.”
Rodgers is used to life in this part of the world, where one league defeat can constitute the onset of a crisis. But some of his players are learning the hard way.
He said: “It always is. When you’re at the biggest clubs, the most fanatical clubs, the highs are very high and lows are low. But the key is to remain calm. There was nobody more disappointed than ourselves at the weekend. The level in the second half was not what I would expect. But we have to move on. Now we’ve got a great chance in the Champions League to do that. Then we can move on to the weekend.”
And yet, against this brutally punishing backdrop, Rodgers must patch them up and send them back out into a competition that has been sucking confidence out of them since it began in September. While hoping no more damage is inflicted as Smith once did all those years ago. He nodded and said: “It can be damaging – and it’s a great point.
“It definitely brings bumps in the road, that’s for sure. You can be doing well domestically and then come up against world-class players you can maybe struggle with. Then, of course, that is a challenge. But either way you have to enjoy it, embrace it. It’s a level where you wouldn’t want to be in any other competition, of course other than if you moved on from it into the Europa League to remain in Europe.
Asked if he’s had to wrap an arm around his star men, as Smith used to have to do, he said: “That’s it, that’s the job. And if you think of a lot of the games we’ve played, how we’ve started in those games, that tells you the players are going into them with confidence.
“Think how we started away in Feyenoord, at home to Lazio and Atletico Madrid – even our game away from home against Atletico. That tells you the confidence is clearly there. And that’s our job, to keep perspective on where we are at but also to always have that ambition to do well.”
The constant battering over the head of the 10 years without a home win statistic, most probably does not help matters. Rodgers said: “That’s the challenge. Ten or 15 years ago football was different. The game evolves but we still have the ambition and the dream to be successful.
“Successful means qualifying and getting into the knock-out stages. That will always be the ambition here for sure. Winning home games is important for that. I don’t think about the run and I’ve told the players not to think so much about it. You can only attack the game and do the very best you can.
“They don’t need to. The burden is not all on them. They can only can think of now and showing that they can perform and play with that passion and technical ability. If they do that over the course of the game we can get a result for sure.
“I still see Celtic as a Champions League club – I absolutely do. But it’s about finding that consistency. A full-strength squad, playing to the level that we did against Atletico Madrid? If we could try to sustain that then we would have very chance.”
Not this time round though. No, all that remains now is for Celtic to go through the motions of fulfilling a fixture they could probably all do without against a Dutch side that has already secured third-place entry into the Europa League.
Rodgers was asked yesterday if this final dead-rubber presented his players with a chance to make a statement as far as their longer- term progression is concerned.
He said: “You can make a performance. Whether it’s a pre-season game or a game like this, there are no
friendlies for Celtic, no games you just dismiss.
