Tommy Martin: In going toe-to-toe, Rodgers' Celtic shoot themselves in the foot

If there is an image in your head from watching Borussia Dortmund over the years, it would be of bright yellow jerseys flooding forward in great mad dashes into open space, galloping up the green sward like the field in the Epsom Derby after rounding Tattenham Corner. Have space, will run quite fast towards your goal, that’s the unofficial Dortmund motto.

It was Celtic’s plan — or at least that’s how it looked — to give Dortmund’s latest batch of speed merchants the freedom of North Rhine-Westphalia, to allow them wide open expanses of lush, verdant country to really get their pistons going.

The slight glitch in the gameplan was the fact that Dortmund, once revelling in the freedom of the Celtic half, were unlikely to politely give the ball back as most rival Scottish teams are wont to do, but instead insisted on lashing it with great force past an increasingly cheesed off Kasper Schmeichel.

On commentary for Virgin Media, Richard Dunne remarked over pre-match pleasantries that Dortmund speedster Karim Adeyemi was a fine player but needed to add end product to his game. This was a fair point, looking at Adeyemi’s stats for last season, in which, for all his gazelle-like qualities, he only scored three league goals.

Alas for Celtic, the German international speedster must have overheard Dunney’s critique, because he proceeded to deliver nothing but end product. It was as if he was driving a truck for Amazon the week before Christmas, such was the end product he was delivering.

Every time Adeyemi touched the ball it seemed to explode off his foot and into the Celtic net. By the end of the first half, he had matched his Bundesliga goalscoring tally for the entirety of last season, and when he wasn’t doing that he was delivering a penalty for his team to add to the Scottish champions’ pain. Sign here please, thank you.

This was the bit that Rodgers was talking about after the game when he lamented that every Celtic mistake resulted in a Dortmund goal. Which was unfortunate from his point of view, because his team made a mistake nearly every time they touched the ball. In fact, if Rodgers’ analysis had been accurate the final score would have been 752-1 rather than 7-1.

But the insanity was in the fact that this was a movie Celtic fans had watched time and again in previous European sorties under Rodgers. The Dortmund debacle was from the guy who brought you a 7-0 defeat to Barcelona in 2016, 5-0 and 7-1 smashings by Paris Saint-Germain in 2017 and a 6-0 thumping by Atletico Madrid last season, in the hitherto signature pummelling of Rodgers’ second spell in charge.

Such scorelines are standard fare in the modern Champions League, of course. Essentially, the ecosystem of European football now consists of champions of small leagues taking merciless beatings at the hands of teams from bigger leagues, then using the money they have made to dish out similar merciless beatings to smaller teams in their own leagues, in a circular economy of pain.

Rodgers’ madcap strategy is to keep sending his spear-wielding, loincloth-wearing warriors to face the heavy artillery of the football industrial complex in the defiant belief that this time his men will emerge triumphant. He wants his team not to skulk in the shadows but to take to the open plains and challenge their expensively assembled opponents to have a go if they think they’re hard enough.

Update: it hasn’t gone well. Musing on his third seven-goal spanking in Champions League football as Celtic manager, Rodgers was asked whether he should adapt his approach against superior opposition. “Will we camp in and just wait? No, we won't do that,” Rodgers replied, inadvertently providing Celtic fans with the image of his team locking the dressing room door at Signal Iduna Park and refusing to come out, a far more sensible tactical approach than the one they ended up using.

From the first whistle Celtic front players charged forward to press high into the Dortmund half. The German side evaded their advances like you might side-step an approaching elderly couple on the pavement, doffing their caps politely as they went about their business.

The problem for Celtic was that while the likes of Daizen Maeda, Kyogo Furuhashi and Nicolas Kuhn were going hell for leather up top, the lads further back were still thumbing through pages of the high-pressing manual, wondering why it was all in Dutch.

It was a particularly testing night for their American centre-half Auston Trusty, making only his third start for Celtic in place of the injured Cameron Carter-Vickers. His performance was in keeping with his name, which suggests an unreliable British-made motor car from the 1970s that keeps breaking down when you need it most.

All of which was to result in acres of Rhineland meadow in which to cavort and gambol for Dortmund’s quicksilver attackers, with Ireland’s Liam Scales carrying out an honourable but doomed role in the Celtic defence, like a man trying to put out the Great Fire of London armed with a bucket.

A flying start to their domestic campaign and a 5-1 thumping of Slovan Bratislava in their opening Champions League match had provided encouragement, not that Rodgers ever needs it, to abandon all caution at the home of the German giants. But instead of going toe-to-toe, they shot themselves in the foot, again and again.

Brendan Rodgers is not insane. He’s probably just relentlessly optimistic, a believer in doing things the right way, a positive kind of guy. But the way football is these days, that’s insane enough.