Five burning questions about Brendan Rodgers

When I heard that Celtic were appointing Brendan Rodgers I was absolutely buzzing! He’s the best man for the job and the manager most fans wanted to see in the dugout.

In order to find out more about his time at Liverpool, I spoke to Read Liverpool’s Ste Hoare to give his thoughts on Rodgers, his time at the club and what we can expect from him at Celtic.

What do you make of Celtic appointing Brendan Rodgers?

I was quite surprised when I first heard the link as I thought Brendan would want to stay in the Premier League. However, when Swansea chose not to change managers, there wasn’t really any other job for him. Everton weren’t going to go for him and the same could probably be said for Watford too, so a move to Celtic makes sense.

Will his attacking football excite Celtic fans and draw back the big crowds?

It depends how he looks to go at it really. When he first came to Liverpool, he spoke about ‘death by football’, where he wanted to control games, keep possession and basically pass teams to death.

Then in 2013/14, he caught lightening in a bottle. He realised that he had something special in Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge and basically changed everything and built the side around getting the best from those two and it was great to see us steamrolling teams on a regular basis.

His last season, he kind of got stuck between both stalls and it was a bit of a mess really. Celtic have the best players in Scotland, so I think he should go for the 2013/14 approach and look to just blow the opposition away.

Where did it all go wrong for Rodgers at Liverpool?

Like I said, he kind of lost his philosophy.

Losing Suarez to Barcelona and Sturridge to injury understandably had a huge impact and the replacements weren’t good enough.

The recruitment of players wasn’t good either, although it’s hard to know exactly how much blame can be put on him and how much goes on the transfer committee.

Finally, I think Brendan got a bit desperate at the end and was constantly changing. We’d sometimes play three or four formations in one game, with players playing out of position and it just looked messy.

Would you consider his time at Liverpool a success?

Ultimately, the answer would be no as he didn’t win anything, and that has to be the benchmark for a Liverpool manager.

The 2013/14 was the best league campaign we’ve had since the early 90’s and I’ve never had more fun than watching us that season, but ultimately, we didn’t get over the line.

The season before that was pretty poor but he was rebuilding with a poor squad, the season after was just bad.

Liverpool didn’t perform too well in the Champions League when he managed them, but do you think he can take Celtic back there again?

I think he can get you through a qualifier but I wouldn’t expect much more to be honest. I was always a Rodgers fan but even I admit that his record in Europe was really bad. He had two cracks at it. In the first, we lost against Zenit in the Europa League because of a poor away performance.

The other, our Champions League season, was terrible. He basically gave up on the game against Real Madrid, which was bizarre. He then failed to get us out of a pretty easy group and we then lost in the Europa League to Besiktas.

I hope, for your sake, that he’s learned from his mistakes because we were really bad in Europe under him.