From Jimmy McGrory to Brendan Rodgers

In 1928 the legendary Jimmy McGrory said “I felt McGrory of Arsenal did not sound right. It wasn’t like McGrory of Celtic”.

It later turned out that the Celtic board were banking on Jimmy McGrory’s departure and the £10,000 transfer fee as a way of boosting the club’s bank balance.

So peeved were they by his refusal of Arsenal’s offer – and no doubt their own loss of face with their Arsenal counterparts – they secretly paid him less than his teammates for the rest of his career.

When McGrory later discovered this he simply said “Well it was worth it just to pull on those Green and White Hoops”.

Time’s change and it’s different strokes for different folks. Football – and a love for a club – are often childhood gifts passed down through the generations. By the time you’re an adult and if football is your job, career choices can often be at odds with your love for the game, or indeed a particular football club. Not everyone is Jimmy McGrory, as we saw with Brendan Rodgers.

Mutually consented by Leicester this week, the gleeful were out in their numbers four years on, as is their right. However, Rodgers’ Celtic exit says as much about us believing his blarney as it does about him.

Rodgers was a charlatan in some regards. He knew which buttons to press when it suited his ends. But when his career was at stake, any love for a football club took second place. And he would have known, had the shoe been on the other foot, had the trophies dried up, loyalty would have been a one-way street from board and fans alike – just ask Neil Lennon.

Now that Rodgers’ job is vacant, it is Ange Postecoglou once again being tiresomely linked with another relegation threatened EPL side. Do you think he would follow the same midnight flit journey down the M74 and M6 to the East Midlands? Would he leave with a Treble on the cards?

The Cult of Ange Postecoglou, in some regards, shows the Celtic support are incapable of learning lessons. There is no issue of ‘once bitten twice shy’ with Postecoglou. Instead, we’ve gone all in once again with beautiful football to watch, crucially also materialising into silverware. And that’s because we always want to believe the big man in the manager’s office will not only bring success but he will do so for as long as he is capable, will absorb our love for Celtic and become one of us.

Whilst Rodgers took advantage of that, don’t believe for a second Ange Postecoglou will.

He’s never once said he was or has become a Celtic supporter, but his Greek immigrant background means he can genuinely relate to the Celtic support, the ethos of the club and what it means to us, and it’s that which will stop him packing his bags with barely a word of goodbye or a thought to the feelings of others.

Ange Postecoglou will leave Celtic, they all do one way or another. But if it is in hands when he does so, he will do so with the same class and respect he’s shown for Celtic since the moment he walked through the door.

Postecoglou and Rodgers are excellent football managers, but that’s pretty much where the comparison ends.

Rodgers will say something and do something else; the warning signs were always there. Be it China and their Super League millions, or courting Dembele to follow suit, or Arsenal and others. We chose to ignore it because, as we saw when it did happen, the fallout would have been too much to bear.

There have been no such warning signs to be ignored from Ange Postecoglou. Whilst Rodgers would struggle to lie straight in bed, with Postecoglou what you see -and hear – is what you get.

I could see a time, when a man who seems to value his personal life and that of his family, feels smothered by the attention and affection, but he won’t jump from the boat mid-stream, that’s simply not his style.

And perhaps we have something to be thankful of in the way Rodgers left Celtic. Because whilst the Celtic support have wounds that are now -in the main – healed following Rodgers’ departure, without it happening it is unlikely we’d be experiencing what we are now under Ange Postecoglou. Now, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I think we’d all have taken that.

As such any hard feelings that were present at the time can now be forgotten about. We have a manager who does not push our buttons or fill our heads with falsehoods, instead we have one who may not feel he is one of us, but sure knows how it feels nonetheless to be a Celt.

He may not be ‘Postecoglou of the Celtic’ in the way Jimmy McGrory was, but he’s also not ‘Rodgers of the Celtic’ in the way Brendan was. And I’ll take that any day of the week.

Niall J