The day Danny McGrain debunked one of the great Brendan Rodgers Celtic myths

As the Celtic support attempt to get their heads around the possibility of a return for Brendan Rodgers they would do well to heed the advice of the man he is now understood to have held talks over succeeding.

Celtic supporters should be grown-up about a potential return for Brendan Rodgers - a separate facts from fictions. (Photo by Alan Harvey / SNS Group)

Ange Postecoglou never shied away from encouraging the club’s fanbase to be grown-up about the - inevitable - constant evolution in the personnel representing their cause. In retrospect, maybe he was hinting at the day that duly arrived last week when he snapped what seemed a special bond forged over two years in moving to Tottenham Hotspur. Whatever, the Greek-Australian regularly stressed it wasn’t wise to develop too deep an attachment to those essentially passing through football clubs. Indeed, he articulated that more bluntly only in January. “I think it was my first year of coaching [in 1998] that my favourite player left me after two games because he had a better offer, so I have never fallen in love with them,” he said.

The business of professional betterment trumps sentiment in the game and Postecoglou - having now proved that very point, after regularly floating it - essentially offered a life lesson the Celtic faithful should chew over in assessing how they ought to feel if Rodgers sweeps back into their club. Hell had no fury to match the loathing they expressed on feeling spurned by the Irishman when he departed for Leicester City in February 2019. Football is an emotive game. But the sense of crazed betrayal did not seem commensurate with Rodgers then deciding the opportunity to helm a then leading English Premier League club was irresistible… on the back of becoming the only Celtic manager in the club’s history to win seven straight domestic honours.

Feelings towards Rodgers among many in the Celtic fanbase have mellowed since Postecoglou essentially followed a similar path and this precedessor, jettisoned by Leicester in April, emerged as a potential replacement. Not least because the other front runners have taken the form of Manchester City assistant Enzo Marseca, former Norwich City manager Daniel Farke and Bobo/Glimt’s Kjetil Knutsen. Rodgers’ pedigree and credentials to fill the vacancy are in a different stratosphere from that grouping and the grown-up approach, then, would be to judge him solely on this basis.

Yet a scan through social media suggests doing so still proves difficult for some. To the extent Rodgers is actually often being unfairly impugned. No question, the 50-year-old possesses a vainglorious streak - a charge plenty of us have had levelled at us, in truth - but the reality is there is gilding when it comes his oft-discussed tendencies to gild of the lily. Few journalists sat in on more of his press gatherings across his two-and-a-half years in Glasgow than I did. Sit-ins to be recalled for the generosity with which he gave his time, and his candour. I simply do not recognise the painting of him as a sociopath spitting out falsehood after falsehood.

Indeed, one myth must be bust for once and for all. Even in recent days the ‘Danny McGrain lie’ has been receiving big licks. Rodgers is claimed to have stretched truth beyond breaking point when relating, at night in the Hydro promoting his autobiography in May 2017, that the Celtic legend had asked him if he still wanted him around as he waited off changing into his training gear ahead of their first encounter. To which the Celtic manager replied that the icon would always have a place at the club as long as he was around. The wonderfully impish McGrain, his humour not so much dry as parched, apparently later questioned this interaction at a supporters’ function. Well, on April 24, 2019 - two months after Rodgers had left - McGrain was promoting a biography of Jim Holton at Hampden. It offered the opportunity to get to the bottom of the claim and counter-claim over his introduction to Rodgers. So I did, asking him if the episode had unfolded as related at the Hydro. McGrain was narked by my enquiry, and both asked me why he would not have sought to establish his position at that time and why on earth I was questioning it years later.

In terms of Rodgers’ apparent forever contriving for the sake of image projection, another interaction with him always comes to mind. Ahead of their 2016 Champions League opener that pitted Celtic against a Barcelona with his former Liverpool striker Luis Suarez spearheading their attack, interrogating Rodgers on his handling of the cynical frontman proved a must. So what on earth, I asked, did he say to Suarez when he bit Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanović in April 2013, towards then end of his first management campaign at Anfield. Nothing, confessed Rodgers, to which I enquired how this squared with the importance he placed on values and ethics. Is this a chat or part of the press conference?, he then snapped. Well capable of thinking on his feet, it would have been easy for him to invent some private chat with the Uruguayan to ensure it never happened again (it didn’t on Rodgers’ watch). Instead of the tacit admission he turned a blind eye that hardly presented him in the best light.

Rodgers might have talked some rot, but just as much rot has been talked about him. Even extending to Celtic supposedly losing their way across his closing months. They lifted the League Cup and won 10 of the 11 league games they played over that period…His tenure wasn’t without blots - a chequered signing record towards the end and some horrible thumpings as his team struggled to make much headway in Champions League won’t be overlooked - but as a driven individual with genuine coaching chops no more suitable candidate seems in the frame for the unenviable task of taking up the baton from Postecoglou. And facts and fictions deserve to be separated in arriving at any judgements.