BRENDAN Rodgers has turned down the chance to play a friendly match during Celtic’s mid-season trip to Dubai, believing such an arrangement would be counter-productive. The Scottish champions have taken advantage of the SPFL Premiership’s month-long winter shutdown to journey out to the United Arab Emirates for an eight-day training camp.
Agreeing to a bounce match with a local or other visiting side during that stay would likely have brought commercial benefits but Rodgers felt that, with Celtic having already played 36 competitive games this season, it was more important for his players to rest and recuperate.
“We’re not playing any games,” he confirmed. “It gives us more training time. We flew out on Friday and had our first training session [yesterday]. We’ll do that through the week. We don’t need any games.
“We just want to reinforce our principles and work on different aspects of the game. There’s always a commercial element [to consider] but this isn’t a commercial trip, it’s a football one. I have been given the freedom since I came in in the summer, to the credit of the club, to look at the fixture list and see how it would pan out.
“If we were to be successful as we wanted to be, then we identified this period as one for recovery with a warm-weather training camp. I said Dubai because you’re pretty sure it’s going to be warm. The club have helped with everything I’ve ever wanted. It’s all gone to plan. There’s been a huge volume of games. The players have had a lot thrown at them, physically and mentally, in the seven months that we’ve been here. I think that refresher will help and allow us to work on other aspects of the game.”
The rest means that Celtic will not have played a match since the derby win over Rangers on Hogmanay by the time they return to take on Albion Rovers in the Scottish Cup on January 22 but Rodgers sees only positives in that.
“I don’t see it as [a potential banana skin],” he added. “I only see the winter break as a positive for us. Press the reset button and get ready to go again. The beauty of it is we’ll be fresh [for this cup tie] and we’ll maybe have one or two new players. We’ll certainly have a few back [from injury] like Kieran Tierney and Tom Rogic. It can only benefit us.”
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