Scott Brown and the Celtic out with the bathwater call Brendan Rodgers would never have made – Keith Jackson
scott brown #scottbrown
To this day Brendan Rodgers refers to him as Celtic’s glue. The man who binds an entire club together not just in the huddle or on the pitch but behind the scenes as well.
In fact, if the Northern Irishman was still in charge at Parkhead it’s entirely unimaginable that Scott Brown would be about to walk his team out of the tunnel for the very last time on Wednesday night for a final home league game against St Johnstone.
Yes, they’ll lay out all manner of messages and banners wishing their great No.8 all the best and it will be straight from the heart. But it’s not a tribute match they should be giving him. It shouldn’t even be a send off.
Rodgers simply would not have allowed it to happen. On the contrary, he’d have moved heaven and earth to convince Brown to turn down Aberdeen’s offer of a fast track into coaching and most probably by promising him an even more obvious pathway through the ranks at Celtic ’s Lennoxtown HQ.
That the men currently in charge of laying the foundations for a huge summer rebuild have failed to do likewise smacks of another bad mistake in a campaign which has been carpet bombed by them.
Put it this way, when Rodgers bailed out for Leicester City two years ago, he spent his first few weeks at the King Power persuading the likes of Jamie Vardy and Wes Morgan that they should stick around to help him oversee the transition.
Rodgers sensed that by holding them close and personally cementing their status at the club, they would bring the rest of their teammates with them.
Which is precisely why it feels as if Celtic have taken their eye off the ball by letting Brown slip off into the distance while focusing on securing a replacement for Neil Lennon. If it is, eventually, to be Eddie Howe who takes over this listing ship then the Englishman would have benefited greatly from having such a vastly experienced and decorated captain still on board.
It makes no sense at all that Brown was not made to feel as important to Celtic’s immediate future as he has been to its recent past, even if there are those who believe his time has come and gone in terms of his influence on the pitch
The truth of the matter is Brown has still been head and shoulders above most of his team mates in some of Celtic’s biggest matches this season. That they have failed to win most of them has not been down to him.
And yet it does feel now that the Broonie is about to be thrown out with the bathwater, as the club prepares to reinvent itself this summer.
And let’s not make the mistake of believing he hasn’t given this move to the north east a great deal of consideration. Brown is nowhere near as daft as he likes you to think.
He may have made self deprecation a personal art form over the years but be in no doubt he fully understands the significance of opting to walk away from the club at this monumental moment.
And even though he tends not show any signs of emotion, deep inside the 35-year-old will fully understand the sheer enormity of the occasion when he walks out into Celtic’s echo chamber on Wednesday night. After 14 years of trophy hunting in Glasgow’s east end, it does feel like an empty ending of an era.
He almost certainly won’t enjoy all the fuss but his contribution deserves to be appropriately acknowledged and respected all the same. And – given the historic scale of his achievements – not just by Celtic’s own people but by his opponents alike.
In fact, it’s deeply regrettable that his final Old Firm match the other weekend ended with a crude and classless farewell from a high ranking Rangers official inside the Ibrox tunnel in the immediate aftermath of a 4-1 thrashing.
Record Sport understands the Parkhead hierarchy are aware of this incident which took place as a disconsolate Brown made his way back to the away dressing room while Steven Gerrard and his players celebrated a fourth derby win of a whitewash season against their crestfallen neighbours.
That they have chosen not to lodge a complaint suggests that it was all fairly low key, perhaps no more than petty stuff even if the conduct of the senior Ibrox employee – who provocatively goaded Brown as he made his way inside – was regarded as ‘wholly inappropriate behaviour’ by those who witnessed it.
There’s a golden rule where this kind of thing is concerned. It’s one thing for players and coaching staff to let their passions run high in the heat of the battle and to allow the moment to get the better of their sensibilities but it’s quite another for the men in suits to lower themselves into the guttural bating of the opposition.
Celtic might have chosen not to make a big deal of it but Rangers as a club should be better than that nonetheless – especially given that Brown went out of his way to offer his support to Glen Kamara before the previous league encounter between the sides at Celtic Park.
That pre-match gesture alone showed there can still be a level of respect and human decency around this rivalry, even among the men who are out there kicking lumps out of one another for 90 minutes.
Yes, Brown has made a habit of winding up his opponents over the years and Rangers in particular and granted he’s been guilty of doing a fair bit of gloating himself over the years.
But let’s not be blinded to the scale of the man’s achievements in a green and white shirt just because you don’t like the look of his shaven headed face.
It does feel as if there is a reluctance to recognise Brown’s contribution to the game in this country and maybe that’s to be expected given his highly aggressive, combative playing style as well as the number of noses he has left out of joint over all these years.
But it could be that even Celtic themselves won’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone and that seems close to unfathomable.