Brendan Rodgers loped off the Liverpool team coach and into the players’ entrance at Anfield at the centre of the football universe. Stranded for almost an hour behind thousands of hysterical scousers on Walton Breck Road, some hanging off lampposts, others scaling nearby scaffolding, the tempest which had stalked him all year rumbled into life on the last Sunday of April in 2014.
The defeat by Chelsea that day remains one of the most visceral examples of how cruel football can be. You can win 11 matches in a row, you can boast the best striker in the world and you can open up a five-point vacuum at the top (with three matches to go) but one slip can bring it all crashing down. Steven Gerrard, the captain, later wrote in his autobiography My Story that on the drive home he “couldn’t even tell you if the streets were thick with traffic or as empty as I was in the inside.”
Spare a thought, too, for Rodgers. Managers plot and scheme throughout the week but when match day arrives they stand on the side-lines, as helpless as the rest of us, watching their careers unravel before them. Demba Ba’s breakaway goal, met jubilantly by former ally Jose Mourinho, proved to be the beginning of the end for Rodgers on Merseyside. Having hauled himself from his sick-bed to stick the knife in, Mourinho gambolled down the touchline, pounding his chest. As Gerrard said: “It was over.”
Two years later, Rodgers is at Celtic, the Scottish champions, on a one-year rolling contract. A step down, some said. “I’m from a council estate in Northern Ireland, so I’m not a snob about football,” he insisted last month. It took years of coaching for him to get his first top job. Many don’t even remember that he managed Watford and Reading. Despite some decent progress, sowing the seeds for later successes under different managers, his tenures at both Vicarage Road and the Madejski were as brief as they were unremarkable.
Like many bosses forged from the home nations, the 43-year-old had to break through the glass ceiling that is the Championship to even be noticed. He embraced Roberto Martinez’s legacy at Swansea City, playing vibrant, possession-based football to win promotion, before beating the Spaniard to the Liverpool job in 2012. Having managed Suarez, Gerrard, Coutinho et al south of the border, Rodgers must now conjure up a working stratagem on far less fertile ground at Parkhead.
Defeat to Gibraltar minnows Lincoln Red Imps in the first-leg of their Champions League qualifier this month, the ‘shock on the Rock’, brought back the sting of failure. The ridicule which has often followed Rodgers in the past returned. There was no chance of a repeat at Celtic Park this week. The part-timers were put in their place by goals from Mikael Lustig, Leigh Griffiths and Patrick Roberts before half-time. The second-half became a procession. A daunting trip to the Kazakhstani capital is their reward, to face Astana in the next round.
Rodgers joked: “It's a six-hour flight, five-hour time difference, 35 degrees-plus, a plastic pitch, with no water, but apart from that… it should be alright.” A cynic would say he’s getting his excuses in early. The Carnlough-born boss will know Astana drew games against Atletico Madrid, Benfica and Galatasaray in the group stage of last season’s Champions League. It’s no home banker.
Beforehand, Celtic welcome Leicester City to Glasgow today for their opening match of the International Champions Cup; more of a cash cow than a legitimate exercise. Billed by the competition’s organisers as a “battle of champions” – pitting England’s best against their Scottish counterparts – Rodgers will also meet the latest member of the Premier League winners' club. Claudio Ranieri, a first-time champion at 64, is living proof that time can heal the wounds of past failures.
Rodgers has preached a deep-rooted love for Celtic which, he says, stretches back to his childhood on the Northern Irish coast. That may be true but make no mistake; this is a one-man, one-season mission to stitch his reputation back together again. Maintaining the Bhoys’ dominance of Scottish football is the bare minimum expected of him. The threat posed by Rangers is real but should remain largely distant in their first year back from oblivion. Rodgers knows the Champions League is the gauge with which his tenure will be judged. It's a shop window for Celtic managers.
The pyrotechnic haze of that sun-drenched April afternoon in 2014 has long since faded but the ghost lingers. The exorcism has begun in earnest for Rodgers at Parkhead. – The Independent