You can’t get a much bigger deferential in stadiums than the ones that Celtic visited in Dortmund and Dingwall. The Westfalenstadion in Dortmund holds almost 82,000, the Global Energy Stadium in Dingwall holds around 6,500. The same can be said of the two teams who inhabit both stadiums, they both gave Celtic big problems, one for their brand of fast attacking football, the other for their well organised deep defensive football, thankfully we managed to overcome one of them at Dingwall yesterday at noon.
Tuesday night in Germany was a hard watch, and hopefully a lesson learnt, you know you’re having a hard time when you’re hoping the referee will halt proceedings when we are 5-1 down, and when you’re dreading 3 minutes of added on time. It was almost a Murphy’s Law night, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, we conceded two penalties, unusually Daizen got caught in possession twice near our own goal, Kasper lost two near post goals, but made several good saves, and it has to be said, we had about four great opportunities to score in the second half. So I’m still trying to work out what went wrong, and how do we fix it? I’ve said before, Brendan is an elite manager, and knows more about football than I do, but I think we need to tweak the system to deny opposition of that calibre so much space. But we are the Famous Glasgow Celtic, we enjoyed the atmosphere and the camaraderie with the Dortmund supporters.
We know when we go to Dingwall it will be a difficult game, Ross County over the years have always made it hard for us, you can’t really blame them with their limited resources. Once again the substitutes made the difference, and that’s exactly what they are supposed to do. Football has changed from an eleven a side, to a thirteen a side, and more recently a sixteen a side game. The problem for the manager is trying to juggle a big playing squad in these days of rotation. Brendan said after the game that we had played seven games in twenty-three days, and quite a few players have played in all of them, so maybe for once an International break will be good for us.
I’ve been really impressed with Luke Mc Cowan, this Bhoy is desperate to play for his Boyhood Hero’s, he makes a difference every time he steps onto the pitch, and I believe if he gets a run in the team, it will be hard to put him on the bench again, young Luke has a lot to offer in our midfield. So next up for us is Aberdeen, they have had a great start to the season, I think because of that great start the rustle of sweetie papers has got louder at Pittodrie Stadium. Let’s hope that the Bhoy’s away on International duty come back safe and sound, and the Bhoy’s left behind have a good rest, it’s also a chance for Cameron and Greg to regain fitness.
Glasgow’s still Green & White.
