On the long walk along London Road after the game on Saturday I overhead, “Any manager playing one up front clearly doesn’t have confidence in his team”. I hear variations on this quite often. It’s not true. In fact, I watched the hot favourites for the England and Wales (see what I did there) Premier League beat their main rivals with this formation last night.
Playing one up front can be as much of an attacking formation as playing two, or even three strikers. Any formation, 4 -2-3-1, 4-4-2 or 3-5-2 is not in itself overtly attacking or defensive. Even the often ridiculed 4-6-0 can be expansive.
There are a few ways to score goals. Martin O’Neill’s Celtic mastered the set-piece. For a period, a considerable percentage of our goals came either this way, or from cross balls. There’s also the classic long ball to a ‘big one up front’ who can knock it down to a penalty box poacher. Both these plays exploit the advantages of direct play, which in itself can break packed defences.
The modern game increasingly relies on alternatives, specifically creating space and movement. Don’t crowd the box, drag defenders out to allow pacey support players to break beyond them. At the very elite level, one of the game’s greatest ever goal-scorers, Christiano Ronaldo, exploits this space magnificently from the wings. Our own top striker, Leigh Griffiths, played a similar role before being handed the No. 9 role at Celtic. I suspect his best position isn’t, in fact, as a No. 9.
We need many things at Celtic, most specifically a defensive mid (another formation story), but we don’t need to revert to a 4-4-2. We need players who understand the importance of space in the final third, and who can exploit it.
Ronny has recruited a flood of wide players since arriving 18 months ago with very little success. Which has had an acute cost.
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There should be a petition against;
People who wiggle their index and ring finger to signify inverted commas?
HamiltonTim
Are you one of those Marxist malcontents we hear so much about:)
You are one of the best Celtic fans on CQN.
No doubt.
HH
Neganon2
You cannot let go can you?
My experience of dealing with Celtic does not reflect the picture you paint.
They have been cooperative and helpful on a number of matters from Res12 to the OST to the Supporters Forum.
On Res12 when things have not gone the way I have liked or as fast as I would want, the reasons, as the other shareholders reps could confirm, have been – well reasonable. Delays have been caused by logistics and not unwillingness.
The OST was a breeze and implemented in short time because it had a close fit with the Foundation ethos.
The Supporters Forum has its problems in representational terms and need for privacy (caused btw by the very thing you rightly complain of, which is the nature of Scottish society) but at least Celtic were listening to points being made about improving communication and the SLO created a mechanism to improve it.
So I am not in denial, I just don’t recognise the picture you paint for its not my experience and I can no more deny that than you can deny yours.
Now there might be reasons why our experience is different and mine has been more positive than yours might have been. Only you know your experience and what contributed to it.
What I find in life is that WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get.
Well that’s my experience and I like to share it but have no intention in doing so in challenging or denying your experience.
But please, because I don’t want to bore the blog, stop making reference to me with unfounded claims.
I sing my song, I dance my dance, but according to an Arab saying ” the nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens”
” Celtic malcontents ”
Copyright Jack McGinn
To podium or not to podium?
ThatIsTheQuestion CSC
p8ddy (23rd Dec @ 12:28am), thanks for sharing your views.
I didn’t actually say that I think the Scottish league is inferior to the Austrian, Swedish and Norwegian leagues, although I certainly don’t think we can justifiably claim that it is any better than those competitions. UEFA’s country ranking (http://kassiesa.home.xs4all.nl/bert/uefa/data/method4/crank2016.html) would appear to back up this assertion, with Austria ranked 16th, Sweden 21st and Norway 22nd.
Scotland is ranked 25th.
Those leagues are definitely more competitive than the SPL, and in terms of the UEFA coefficient, more teams tend to contribute to the total. The rarity with which any Scottish team other than Celtic actually gets past even one qualifying round in Europe diminishes any success that Celtic do have, as coefficient points are divided between all the teams from each country. So the other teams’ early exits dilute Celtic’s points.
A year ago only Austria (of those three) was ranked higher than Scotland, a fact that points to Scotland being a country in decline, while Sweden and Norway are on the up. And no, we should never expect to beat anyone, in Europe or domestically. I’m sure Man Utd expected to beat Norwich at the weekend, as Barcelona expected to beat us way back when. Whoever you are and whoever you are playing, you have to earn victories with effort, application, concentration and discipline. It matters not a jot what the management team say before the game, if the players don’t do those four things to the best of their ability, then any match can end in defeat.
Your reference to the fact that Celtic “were a pot 3 champions league team” fails to acknowledge that the team placed in pot 3 achieved this distinction largely due to the European performances of their predecessors, the coefficient being accrued over a five year period. So it is partly due to the relative lack of success by that pot 3 team that we have dropped to where we are today. It has been downhill pretty much since the dissolution of MON’s UEFA Cup Final team, further impacted by the wider financial environment to boot.
We could have continued buying players from the EPL in an attempt to chase the European dream, but if I point out that in 2008 we were ranked 41st, while a team called Rangers were ranked 24th in Europe, it is clear where such a policy may have led us…
On another of your comments, regarding warming up for the Euro qualifiers, wou fail to acknowledge that while we engaged in a few pre-season friendlies, both Malmo and Molde were half way through their competitive league seasons. They were fully fit and match sharp. We were not.
I can’t comment any further at the moment as I have already overrun my lunch break, but to finish, your tongue in cheek suggestion that we should regress to improve may actually be closer to the truth than we would care to accept! Certainly our policy of “pinching” the best players from other SPL teams is not going to enable them to put up more of a fight. Perhaps we should be loaning out more of our youngsters and “squad players” to other SPL teams instead, to give them more chance of pushing us harder. One to ponder perhaps.
And yes, I am fairly satisfied with where Celtic are at the moment: Successful, solvent, and… well… just Celtic. Half a dozen better results a year (in Europe) would make it even better, but that would just be the icing on the cake.
Talking of cakes… At least I’m not a currant bun!