Time for Brendan Rodgers to prove he’s an ‘elite manager’

If Brendan Rodgers really is an ‘elite manager’ then he needs to prove it…

After a week where the club let us down majorly off the pitch, is it any surprise they have let us down on the pitch too? Not to me it’s not. The toxicity surrounding the club at the minute is palpable. It was imperative we picked up three points today to lift the mood but yet again the players and manager have failed to deliver.

We struggled last week against Ross County and continued in that vein once again today. We absolutely dominated the first half but squandered numerous chances to take the lead. Aberdeen came out and displayed a bit of grit and determination to get back into the game in the second half and we absolutely wilted. In all honesty we were probably fortunate to leave Pittodrie with a point.

The atmosphere around the club is starting to resemble the dreaded Covid year. A lot of the anger today will be aimed at the board and the money men who failed to deliver the goods during the January transfer window and rightly so, but I also feel like our manager has to take his share of the blame. Rodgers has at his disposal a squad who are head and shoulders above the rest in the league, and I include theRangers in that assessment. The fact he’s failing to get a tune out of it is nothing short of disgraceful.

Let’s take a look at the league table. We are now six points ahead of our nearest rivals but they have two games in hand. Can you imagine the uproar if we had of lost the Glasgow derby post Christmas? We would currently be sitting joint on points with theRangers with our rivals having two games in hand. Fans would be calling for our managers head. It’s our wins against that lot that has saved the manager from a lot of flack. He won’t be able to hide from it much longer however unless things change drastically.

So far this has been a poor season. Yes we have been top of the league for most of it but let’s be brutally honest, under Mick Beale theRangers were an absolute shambles. Since Clement has come in and steadied the ship they haven’t looked like dropping points against the others in the league while we seem to be struggling week in week out. They have already won the league cup which we exited weakly against Kilmarnock.

Yes we managed to get a much needed win in the Champions League in a dead rubber match against Feyenoord but are yet again out of Europe before Christmas. We have a tough fixture coming up away to St Mirren in the Scottish Cup. That’s a must win fixture now. Go out of that and it leaves our rivals chasing a treble which will have our fans in total meltdown.

A few games into the season I wrote an article saying how much I was missing ‘Angeball’. The football under Postecoglou was a joy to watch. He didn’t achieve everything he set out to and we definitely could have been better in Europe but his brand of football was exciting to watch. I thought then that maybe the team was just in a transitional period and would take a little while to get used to Rodgers style of play.

I was positive it wouldn’t take long before the players adapted to what the new manager wanted and set about dominating Scottish football once again. We had seen it before remember, when Brendan Rodgers came in the first time, leading his troops to an Invincible Treble.

It hasn’t transpired that way however. Instead of ‘first season Rodgers’ this current team look more like ‘third season Rodgers’. When he left for Leicester our team looked pretty much like it does now, void of ideas and inspiration, producing football that fails to excite the fans. It looks stale. It shouldn’t look like this when the manager has players like Kyogo, O’Riley and McGregor at his disposal.

The players on the park look lost. The tactics are so bland and uninspiring. We struggle constantly to break teams down and that is down to the managers tactics. Callum McGregor was absolutely anonymous today, his form has completely fallen off a cliff as has a few others in the team including our star striker Kyogo who is being totally starved of service.

We need to put the nonsense surrounding the transfer window behind us now. Yes it was a shambles but it’s over now and we can’t change the past. We need to concentrate on the players we have with us here and now and our manager needs to be getting the very best out of them.

We constantly hear about how Brendan Rodgers is an ‘elite’ manager. It’s time he proved it.

Conall McGinty

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