Brendan Rodgers has criticised the SPFL for rescheduling last month’s match against Hearts at Tynecastle.
When the fixtures were published in June the match was due to be played on Saturday October 21 which was the weekend prior to Champions League Matchday 3.
Celtic were drawn to play Atletico Madrid on Wednesday October 25 which provided maximum preparation time following exertions at Tynecastle.
Sky Sports tend to use two slots for SPFL matches, Saturday or Sunday lunchtime. For whatever reasons the Hearts match was put back a day to Sunday October 23 with a 2.15pm kick off, drastically reducing preparation time for the match against Atletico.
Addressing that switch and fixture scheduling, Rodgers told the Daily Record:
The one thing I would always ask is if there’s ever a possibility (to help). It always seems to be a challenge in British football where federations can actually help the teams. If you look at us, we played last Wednesday here. We played on the Sunday and Atletico Madrid played on the Saturday and 24 hours is absolutely massive in football for recovery.
It’s not rocket science to know that in the last 15 minutes you might be fatiguing a wee bit due to that day less recovery.
Celtic led twice against Atletico before being pegged back with the Spanish side clearly stronger in the second half until they had a player sent off.
Rodgers has squad issues to attend to in order to make Celtic more competitive in Europe, having a level playing field in terms of preparation times would go some way towards helping Scottish clubs.
Next week Celtic travel to play Atlletico on Tuesday November 7 with the weekend match at Ross County being shown by Sky Sports at 12.30pm on Saturday November 4.
Atletico play away to Las Palmas on Friday November 3 with an 8pm lick-off, with the travel to and from Gran Canaria there isn’t much difference in preparation times for next week’s match.
Load of Baloney, get out and do the job the fans pay to see, no one is interested in lazy non motivated players, things are looking like Bendans 1st spell, slow side and back passing, lack of service up front, always nearly getting there but lacking in creativity.
Take Abada & especially Hatate out the team and the displays are below what I expect from professional players who only have one highly paid part time job.
Athletico played on the Friday before more than us. Obviously this is going to make a difference in the closing stages of the game.
Scottish Football Ambivalence!