Coming back from 1-0 down to win away is a good result in anyone’s book. But when a team has played as poorly as Celtic did today and still comes away with the three points, you have just hold your hands up and praise them.
And that’s exactly what Brendan Rodgers did today. Okay, he gave them a halftime rollicking first, but after a second-half blitz that saw his Celtic team win the match 3-1, the Celtic manager was full of praise for one player who he said was ‘very’ very good’.
Already today TBR Celtic told how Rodgers hailed his captain, Callum McGregor, for dragging Celtic back into the game with his piledriving equaliser and now it’s the turn of winger, Mikey Johnston.
Brendan Rodgers is heavily impressed with Celtic’s Mikey Johnston
Whilst the Hoops gaffer gave praise to all of his second-half substitutes, Rodgers was lavish in his praise for his international winger after he seemed to be the difference after replacing Hyunjun Yang at half-time.
Rodgers said [Celtic FC], “I’m really pleased. I thought Oh was strong and aggressive, Mikey was very, very good. In the duels he looked after the ball but he was really sharp and impressive when he was one-v-one situations.
“Obviously Jamesy coming into the game as well, he scores with a great finish and Tomo [Iwata] breaking forward from midfield to make the pass.
“So yeah, I though all the subs contributed but Mikey was excellent when he came in.”
Johnston will be on cloud nine after receiving equally high praise from Callum McGregor at full time as well.
Brendan Rodgers was raging with his Celtic stars for their first half performance
And whilst the Celtic boss was delighted with the overall win, he was deeply unhappy at the lacklustre display shown by his team in the first 45 minutes.
Rodgers continued, “The goals were very, very good and we had other chances to score more.
“But, yeah to be totally honest I’m still angry after that first half because it’s not what I expect but you’ve got to give huge credit to players for the second half because they reacted how we would want and that was more like the level I expect.”
It was a very unusual step by the Celtic manager to criticise his players so publicly and from the television pictures you could see he was very unhappy.
Hopefully this is the rocket that the Celtic team need to kick on and start producing for the fans because recently, they just haven’t been at the races domestically.
Hibs is up next and it will be interesting to see Rodgers’ team selection for the visit of the capital side on Wednesday night.
In other news, ‘Waffle’… Chris Sutton takes issue with Kris Boyd’s ‘really strange’ Celtic comments (tbrfo