TWO years almost to the day after he sat above the plush Majorcan resort of Port Adriano with his future wife Charlotte to toast his appointment as Celtic manager with a glass of champagne, Brendan Rodgers will return to the Balearic island this week to drink in everything he and his team have achieved since.
Saturday’s William Hill Scottish Cup final victory against Motherwell means the Northern Irishman has a two-year period to survey which can put even some of the all-time greats of Scottish football management in the shade, but this is no time for self-congratulation.
Like all the best football managers, Rodgers’ mind is already ticking onto the next campaign, and working out how Celtic can get better still.
“When does the panic set in?” he joked. “Probably midweek. I’ll be sat in Majorca and it will all kick in. But I think it’s great for the people to enjoy - we had a brilliant day yesterday for a great servant of the club in Browny. Then I will get away Monday and rest for a bit, which is important. I will re-energise and then it will be thinking about going again next year.’
“It can be a challenge to switch off,” he added. “There is always work to do, but in order to have the resilience you have to break the cycle. You have to come out of the battle and rest and recover because that gives you the energy to go again.”
Eventually a domestic trophy will come along which Celtic won’t win. It was a minor crisis back in December this season, after all, when they were beaten for the first time in a domestic match. But it is still anyone’s guess when that will come along. Having completed the first ever invincible treble, and now the first double treble, Rodgers, a master of motivation and goal setting, will already be setting his sights higher. Why not Scottish football’s first-ever treble treble? “You could never imagine it could go as well as it has,” said Rodgers. “From the first day I walked in to the club it’s been amazing. It’s always complex, it’s never as easy as it seems when you win, a lot of stuff goes on behind the scenes. All the interests are aligned at the club and that allows me to work in confidence. But to think we’d be standing here two years later having created history, no, I’d be lying if I thought that.”
Read more: Tam McManus: The gap is huge - don’t bet against a Celtic triple treble
No two eras, of course, are the same. Rodgers has come to the club, and contributed wholesomely to, a unique period of Parkhead dominance, but considering how many of Scottish football’s greatest names – Jock Stein, Martin O’Neill, Bill Struth, Walter Smith, even Sir Alex Ferguson – were unable to complete a double treble, perhaps the most startling thing of all is that over the course of 61 domestic matches, Celtic rarely had to be at their very best this season. “I think what we gained from this year is that when you’re not always at your best you can still win,” said Rodgers. “But as a manager I have to push them harder.”
What the Northern Irishman is blessed with – to use a phrase he coined in relation to Tom Rogic – is a core of players in their ‘asset age’ between roughly 25 and 30, precisely the age range which so many of their rivals find hard to hold onto. You could easily rhyme off Rogic, Callum McGregor, Stuart Armstrong, James Forrest, even given the experience they have at their tender years, Kieran Tierney, Olivier Ntcham and Moussa Dembele. As so often was the case this season, the fact most of them put typically sterling shifts in for the cause on Saturday was enough to take this showpiece away from a game Motherwell side.
Read more: Martin O'Neill insists Brendan Rodgers can follow up double treble with Celtic European success
“Twenty five to 30 is when you are making lots of improvements as a player and that is your asset age,” said Rodgers. “When you develop a player for a couple of years you don’t want to lose that experience or you can be back to square one.”
Celtic under Brendan Rodgers bring a meticulousness and professionalism to their preparation which few of these other great sides of Scottish football past can match, even if there was an ad hoc aspect of their celebrations, Tierney taking a banner from the crowd with the legend ‘Double Treble’ written on it. Motherwell scrapped away as you might have expected but their cause essentially seemed lost as soon as Celtic had snaffled two goals in the first 25 minutes. There was no shame here for the Fir Park side, even if they could have been more pro-active to stop Callum McGregor pouncing to score a sweet right-foot opener. Gael Bigirmana struck the angle of post and bar, and Elliot Frear was just out of reach of Ryan Bowman’s header, but the only other goal was a low strike from Ntcham which flicked Kipre’s heel on its way past Trevor Carson.
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