Celtic’s decision to postpone their clash with St Johnstone seems pretty straightforward.
After it was announced yesterday, it was hard not to cast your mind back to this time last season.
Brendan Rodgers decided not to postpone Celtic’s clash with Livingston, which fell between their Champions League play-off ties, just as the aforementioned St Johnstone fixture did.
Little did he know, Celtic were to be handed the longest away trip in UEFA competition history.
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Forgive the crying over spilled milk, but that decision has aged just like milk.
We all know what happened in the tie against Kairat Almaty, perhaps the single biggest contributing factor behind Rodgers’ eventual departure.
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It brings me no pleasure to say that Kairat are one of Celtic’s potential opponents again this time around.
Rodgers made eight changes for the Livingston game, giving Callum McGregor a rare rest and handing Hayato Inamura his only competitive minutes in a Celtic shirt.
Clearly, Kairat should’ve been dispatched regardless of whether the Livi game went ahead or not. The defeat was one of many embarrassing upsets inflicted on the Hoops during their recent European history.
But surely, if Rodgers had a time machine, he would go back and postpone the game to allow for extra training preparation ahead of a 16-hour round trip to Central Asia.
It’s hard not to feel that said extra preparation could well have had a material impact on the result, and subsequently the season as a whole.
Again, it’s worth noting that the decision was locked in before we knew that Kairat were the opponents.
But Rodgers explained at the time: “We’ll play the game. We looked at that [postponing] and decided that we wanted to play that for a number of reasons.
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“Obviously, getting players up to speed and fitness, and yeah, we’ll have a good squad of players here, and if I need to rotate it and change it, I can do.”
Clearly, that extra speed and fitness didn’t do much favours for Inamura and Shin Yamada, who was also handed his only start for the club.
Even more damningly, Hyunjun Yang started the Livi clash and remained in the XI for the second leg in Kazakhstan – proceeding to put in one of his worst performances of his Parkhead career.
Thankfully, we’ve got one less thing to worry about (of many) ahead of this year’s tie…
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