From the moment Brendan Rodgers arrived in Glasgow on Monday, it was hard not to feel that his union with Celtic could be a perfect match.
On Monday afternoon, Celtic tweeted a picture of Rodgers in the people carrier taking him to Celtic Park, and there was already the sense that everything was going to be ok.
Brendan Rodgers has arrived in Glasgow and is on his way to Paradise! #WelcomeBrendan pic.twitter.com/iigRxS5HNl
— Celtic Football Club (@CelticFC) May 23, 2016
Rodgers was deeply tanned and assured, while conveying that relentless positivity which is his trademark, this time through the medium of the two thumbs up he was giving the photographer.
Something is needed to take Scottish football away from the pettiness which so often drags it down, and which it was suffering from again in the wake of the fall-out from the events following the Scottish Cup final.
Perhaps it is beyond even the soaring rhetoric of Rodgers to alter the complexion of the SPL, to take it away from the attritional and tiresome agendas and tit-for-tat outrages. If Brendan Rodgers can’t make the transformation, it certainly won’t be for a lack of trying.
Rodgers, as he would surely say himself, wants to appeal to the better angels of our nature. In Glasgow appealing to angels of any nature might be a controversial and possibly even sectarian act, but if he can maintain this commitment to these glorious abstractions his time at Celtic might just work.
He does, of course, have a lifetime of associations with the club and that allowed him to make those rhetorical points on Monday which can be so enriching when they come off, if so comical when they go wrong.
“I understand the values of this club and I understand the expectation here and the pressures here, because here, it’s not just about winning. Celtic is brought up to win with a style and an identity,” he said, making some key Rodgers points which had the benefit of making sense.
He talked about inspiring the Celtic fans again, about the lure of the club, which he said a couple of times was one of the biggest in the world.
There were times at Liverpool when he sounded like a fantasist, but escapism might be the best thing for Celtic right now, even as many look forward to the resumption of their league meetings with Rangers.
Rodgers may be looking beyond that and Celtic need that vision, almost as much as they need to reach the group stages of the Champions League.
The detail about Rodgers’ expertise in European football might be more troubling given the mess he made of Liverpool’s return to the Champions League in 2014, but the important things on Monday were that he was as a man who can reimagine the club and speak about it in glorious terms.
Of course, Rodgers had to answer questions about his own career trajectory, with some wondering if it could be considered a step down after Liverpool and the Premier League.
There are good reasons for making this claim, but as Rodgers talked about Celtic being “one of the biggest clubs in the world”, it was easy to see why he would choose them over some of the options in England,
Celtic allows Rodgers to tell a heroic story about himself, to hit his marks and marvel at the ambition and history of the club, a history which now includes him.
These are aspects of Celtic’s past which happen to be true, but which also allows for no reduction in the grandness of the tale he tells about Brendan Rodgers.
If he had returned to Swansea or become the manager of, say, QPR, it would have required a startling downsizing of the rhetoric as he returned to a smaller stage, like coming home one night and finding Bono sitting in your sitting-room wearing sunglasses and talking about global poverty.
Rodgers didn’t need that. He needed the global platform which Celtic provides, but they need him too. It is easy to imagine him saying he believes in a place called Paradise. Right now, Celtic could do with a man who believes in those things, who shares his vision of a glorious future and promises to make their world a better place.
