Liel Abada remaining at Celtic is nigh on impossible and fans should try putting themselves in his shoes

There is not much Brendan Rodgers hasn’t seen in more than 700 games as a gaffer when it comes to man management.

When he was at Swansea there was the call in the middle of the night telling him stat man Steven Caulker was in a South Wales jail after a scrap in a nightclub. At Liverpool he had his hands full with Luis Suarez. The Uruguay legend was accused of racially abusing Patrice Evra early in his reign – and that was before he started biting people.

Don’t even mention Mario Balotelli from back then. The big striker was nuttier than a squirrel’s lunchbox. It probably felt similar in his first spell at Celtic trying to keep Leigh Griffiths on the straight and narrow. Rodgers has proved to be a master at man management though. There were calls from then PM David Cameron to bin Suarez back then but instead he penned a new deal at Anfield and was player of the year the season the Reds were a Stevie G slip away from being champions.

Griff managed to get back in his team and fire Celtic to a couple of Trebles. So Rodgers is as good as it gets with this stuff. But this situation at Celtic right now with Liel Abada is different. This isn’t a daft boy to be tempted with a carrot or battered with a stick.

It will take more than an arm around the shoulder to deal with this most delicate of scenarios. It’s simply hard to see any way Abada can remain at Celtic in the short, medium or long term. There are some fans who only see the world through the prism of their clubs and they can’t get their heads around this.

But they should try to put themselves in Abada’s shoes. This is a young lad in a foreign country, while his homeland is involved in an horrific conflict. And when this kid goes to his work, there are people there with