Digging back into Brendan Rodgers’ departure from Celtic 23 months ago the Daily Record has revealed one of the broken promises.
When the club opened their Lennoxtown Training Centre in 2007 it was hailed as a great step forward with the facilities around Barrowfield regularly ridiculed as not fit for purpose for a modern club.
Lennoxtown provided office space, a gymnasium, medical treatment rooms with three full size grass pitches and one artificial pitch.
One aspect that appears to have been neglected is an indoor training area. There is a large ‘Games Hall’ style area but in more recent times full sized indoor pitches have been built at Toryglen and Ravenscraig.
Looking at the timeline to Rodgers’ departure for Leicester, after highlighting the role James Justin and Timothy Castagne are playing at Leicester, Keith Jackson in the Daily Record adds:
Throw in the failure to land John McGinn from Hibs at the start of the season, as well as a long running struggle to convince the club to fork out £5million on an indoor training complex for the academy, and the picture becomes complete.
Rodgers was in no rush to bail out on Celtic but their reluctance to match his ambitions left him with little option. If he could not get his way at that moment, on the back of securing successive domestic clean sweeps, then he probably never would.
After their training stint in Dubai the Celtic squad were back training outdoors at Lennoxtown last week with one grass pitch having undersoil heating surrounded by snow.
In October 2016, five months after joining Celtic, Rodgers discussed the need for an indoor training area at Lennoxtown, something that Ronny Deila had raised with the club.
You do need it. If you have the facility to do that up here, or the finances, I think you should. You can work all year and do great work but then the weather sets in. That’s the big advantage the Europeans have over us.
You lose your coaching. You might go through three or four months, losing time, because it’s not about coaching, it’s about keeping the players warm.
Those comments were made while Celtic were playing in the group phase of the Champions League. Four years later the matter hasn’t been addressed but there are now much more pressing issues for the club to deal with.
