It’s not just by accident that Celtic have gone 32 matches unbeaten in the SPFL.
Twenty-nine wins didn’t just happen by accident because Brendan Rodgers has the best players and the biggest budget.
Rodgers certainly has managerial magic but he has to work damn hard to bring it all together on the park game after game.
Losing managers like to refer to small margins, winners tend to work harder to make the small margins to in their favour as Rodgers demonstrated at Inverness recently when he urged Stuart Armstrong to shoot at goal from a free kick after noticing the position of the goalkeeper.
Having players at peek fitness and understanding what is expected of them is all part of the background work but it’s the 90 minutes and the half time analysis that makes the difference and puts Celtic way ahead of the pack.
Tom Boyd watches the hoops at home and away and enjoys the ‘small margins’ that Rodgers picks up on and exploits to devastating effect.
“Hearts were really up for it against Celtic at the start recently and tested Craig Gordon on a couple of occasions,” the former Celtic defender explained in the Daily Record. “But then a small tactical switch from the manager had an immediate impact with Scott Sinclair’s opening goal after moving his position slightly.
“The manager makes changes and they have an impact. Certainly the matches I’ve seen this season when they haven’t had strikers.
“Sinclair and Patrick Roberts were switched in a previous game against Hearts and Celtic got a goal almost immediately.
“It shows you someone who knows the game and is clued-up to make the sort of changes that influence a game and aren’t just for the sake of it.
“He doesn’t do that and it’s great to have a manager of the quality who can influence matches at the start of games and also during them to change the course of the match.
“He knows how to handle the teams in Scotland and how to tweak things if it’s not quite happening.”
Boyd added: “It’ll take a massive drop in the quality of the players at Celtic for them to lose.
“Mikael Lustig played a pass up the line against Hearts, trying to fire it to Callum McGregor and it was a couple of feet wide of him.
“The manager was raging and that just shows he won’t let standards drop for the team.
“That’s because it would be a massive achievement, not just to win the league, but to then go on and go through the season unbeaten.
“That’s an incredible ask but when you see performances and the way they change from defence to attack and quality of the goals and finishing, it would take Celtic to be really off their game for an opponent to have an opportunity to win.”
