BRENDAN Rodgers doesn’t do lazy. After a long day at the office, it always begins early and ends late, he will spend quality time with his family at home before retiring to sit in front of the computer for a few hours.

Unlike the rest of us, Rodgers isn’t spending hours looking at comedy/football/television/film clips. Instead, the Celtic manager is planning for the next long day and beyond that.

This is when he plans training and watches clips of games, players and the opposition. And if the manager puts in so much graft then the underlings better do the same.

If Rodgers felt anyone wasn’t giving all they could, even on those days when the bad, old Scottish weather makes training more of a challenge, the door would soon be shown to them.

It is this work ethic which has made Rodgers the coach and manager he is today. The Celtic players have bought into it. Had they not, they would be earning a living elsewhere.

“You can’t have a lazy day. If you want, you can, but you can’t play at Celtic,” the manager said. “It’s very important they have that psyche. It’s the mind-set we’ve tried to introduce since we came in here.

“If you want to be successful, there’s a price to be paid. It’s one of the laws on the price tag of success. You have to be on it. You have to be ready to work, no matter how you feel. You make a commitment.

“The money is in your bank every month. You come in here and you see a star, which means the club is a European Cup winner. That tells you that you have to be good just to be here.”

Rodgers has seen it go the other way. A good player has won a move to the big club, has all the talent in the world but can’t back that up in terms of attitude. For some, the big club is just too big.

“It’s sometimes why some very good players go to big clubs and people wonder why it doesn’t quite work out for them,” he said. “It’s not that they’re bad players. It’s because every single day of your life at a big club is a challenge. It’s not just about playing for a big club, you have to be ready to train with a big club.

“It’s why so many players that come from very good teams, where they know they’re going to play every week and it doesn’t matter how they train, .when they get a move to a big club, they struggle to train never mind play.

“That’s the way it has to be. It’s the way it is as the biggest level. You have to have that level.”

Celtic are going for a remarkable 70th unbeaten game in a row against Hearts at Tynecastle.

Of course, there are the critics who attack the pointlessness of the Scottish game. Celtic aren’t Manchester City, also unbeaten this season, but nobody is claiming otherwise.

“I’m not after the credit or approval from others,” said Rodgers. “Opinions don’t affect the reality for me. It won’t affect how I prepare for a game. It may for other people but we don’t need it, we just try and win the next game.

“Manchester City are a brilliant team. We played well against them. With all due respect there is not a great deal that has changed in the thinking of Scottish football. It will be deemed to be the lesser compared to England.

“Some of the greatest players in the game have come from Scotland and Ireland to play in England. Guys like Kenny Dalglish and George Best made it, so I think people in England respect that. You can’t worry about that, we don’t have the finances to compete with them, all we can do is develop players and be relative to others up here.”

Celtic beat their own record when they moved beyond the team of 1917 after 63 games without a loss. If such runs were simple, then why did 100 years come and go before it was matched?

It could end today. Hearts at home is as tough a game Celtic will have this season but whenever it does, no team is going to get close to 70 games for a long time.

“It sets the bar, that’s for sure, said Rodgers. “I would suspect that I certainly won’t be here. It’s an incredible achievement. You look back to that team under Willie Maley and the players involved. To have waited 100 years to break it, it tells you the significance of that achievement.

“But when you are in the middle of it and working away you tend to not think so much of it. It’s more the legacy you leave afterwards.

“My job is to manage the expectation. Our expectation is always to win and to do so on so many consecutive occasions is a consequence of that. If the players weren’t human then I’d say the run would never finish. But at some point it will do.

“Whilst we focus and concentrate, then we will keep looking to win games. That’s our job and my job is to make sure the players are focused and for them not to feel the pressure of wanting to defend an unbeaten sequence but, rather, to win the game and that is the mentality they have.”