A delighted Brendan Rodgers spoke to Sky Sports shortly after the final whistle yesterday afternoon at Celtic Park. The Champions began their defence of their title in fine fashion with a dominant display against Kilmarnock who left Paradise flattered by the 4-0 scoreline.
It was a performance meant to send a message to teams like Hearts and the Rangers, who trail Celtic by two points already and will find it difficult to catch the Champions at this level of play.
Following Celtic’s 4-0 victory over Kilmarnock, which moved them to the top of the league with just St Johnstone and Aberdeen left to play tonight evening, here is what Brendan Rodgers had to say to Sky Sports.
Sky Sports: How much of a statement of intent was that today?
Brendan Rodgers: “It was an excellent performance.” It’s all about getting things going in the first game of the season. Many of our combo plays in the offensive third were excellent. We had a different kind of game than we had all preseason, but I felt the boys handled the coordination really well. We scored four very good goals and had a few more opportunities. We got off to a great start.
Sky Sports: Could it have been a few more?
Brendan Rodgers:“I believe we intended to maintain the intensity, but it is challenging since it will wane at this point in the season. We created opportunities, and in the final thirty minutes, the Kilmarnock lads also had difficulty since they had to travel while playing European football. We had to penalise that, and I believe that we played with a really good mentality to try and accomplish that.
Sky Sports: Was it like the title win in May you wanted to make sure they had nothing to hang on to and is that why you made such a fast start?
Brendan Rodgers: “I think that is always key. For us, we always want to start quickly and our game plan today was to do that. We wanted to get the tempo of the game up so that side of it was very good.”
Sky Sports: You seemed to have momentum early on and there were a lot of good individual performances but is it more about the collective at this time in the season?
Brendan Rodgers:While individual excellence is significant, the team is what matters most. I’m glad because, as you can see, we have a hard time man-marking opponents because Kilmarnock is a physically strong team that makes them tough to play against, which is the whole point of the game. We are now able to handle that quite well. In my opinion, this team is constantly becoming better at man-marking teams when there is room or teams in a low block. We had to overcome it today, and some of the attacking and combination play was excellent. Our counter-pressing on the first goal won me over, and there were many more instances where we were able to maintain attacks because we were quick to recover lost balls.
