Nir Bitton signed a new long-term contract today:
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That’s great news. I fear we’ll be cashing in one of these summers but great to get him extended for another four and a half years.
He’ll join Southampton for £11m in 2017.
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We need to gut this current team. Ambrose, Boyata, Blackett and Janko all need to go in defence for a start.
Until the board, management and players start giving a shit about Celtic again, I’m out.
Fuck off with your 
and do one you utter failure
+1.
Signing out for the interim.
I’ll decide today who to throw my armchair support behind for the foreseeable future.
I’m devoting myself 100% to Roma.
Signing in. The darkest time is just before the light.
Celtic have been paired with Ross County in the League Cup semi-final draw.
Hibernian v St Johnstone in the other semi-final.
Ties to be played on the last weekend of January.
Scott Brown has been ruled out for 8-12 weeks. Kris Commons has an illness and short term injury too. Nir Bitton and Stefan Johansen are both suspended for the Ajax game tomorrow night so it’ll be a makeshift midfield set up. Defeat would consign Celtic to bottom of the Europa League group with a game to spare.
Ajax will win this fairly handy.
Who will we have in midfield? Rogic, Mulgrew, Allan?
Yeah, Mulgrew is back in full training and available. He could play Armstrong infield either. I doubt we’ll see Stokes based on him being frozen out all season. Forrest, GMS and McGregor options for wide positions.
Christ that’s depressing.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Little Scotty Allan get a chance though.
Agreed. If he’s fit. Henderson should be playing. Doubt we’re learning much about him at Hibs.
Chris Sutton column in some Scottish tabloid today. I agree with him.
[quote]NEGLIGENT in the boardroom. Naive in the dressing room.
From top to bottom at Celtic Park, there are individuals who should be held accountable for the shambolic European campaign this season. Mismanagement in terms of policy, lack of direction in terms of the football.
From Dermot Desmond to Peter Lawwell, to Ronny Deila and to the players, each has to take their share of the blame for what has been a horrific failure.
First things first, let’s get Thursday night out of the way. Celtic actually didn’t do too badly against Ajax. They played well in spells and were unlucky to lose. But spare me the lame excuses.
The lines were being prepared before the game focusing on the absence of Scott Brown, Nir Bitton, Stefan Johansen and Kris Commons. I accept that hurt Celtic but let’s deal in facts here. Ajax had five key players out too.
As for Celtic having to field an inexperienced team, the average age of the side was 24 while for Ajax it was 22 and a half. It doesn’t wash.
Callum McGregor is being held up as a shining light and the lad did well, with a fine goal to go with a decent display. But he’s spoken about as if he’s 14. He’s 22.
Ajax captain Davy Klaassen is 21 and he is wanted by some of the biggest clubs in England.
You are not a kid at 22. If you’ve not matured as a player and shown you can cut it by 20, you are not going to get there. Full stop.
Which takes me on to the two key issues at Celtic Park right now and the bigger picture. Most importantly, the recruitment side.
I realise Celtic can’t compete with the top leagues in terms of wages and transfer fees. But there is no balance to the signing policy. The buy young, improve-and-sell model is fine but you need some proven players in there too.
Celtic’s strategy might have balanced the books in the past few years but the regression on the pitch has been shocking.
When I heard Deila speak before the game about needing some experienced players in January, I felt like pulling my hair out. Myself and the fans have been saying that for two years. They said it in January when it was clear signings would need to be made and bedded-in for the Champions League qualifiers and they were saying it in June when there was still time.
Nothing happened. Celtic signed untested players such as Nadir Ciftci, Saidy Janko and Dedryck Boyata and the result was an exit. Tyler Blackett, Scott Allan, Jozo Simunovic. Projects. Ryan Christie will now arrive in January. Where is the balance?
The club hierarchy’s argument is that Deila builds teams and progresses players. I’m struggling to see the evidence of that. You can point to Tom Rogic and Kieran Tierney as examples of those who have developed under Deila but for the most part, it’s a nonsense.
If the manager is such a master at it why are the likes of Liam Henderson and Darnell Fisher farmed out to other managers when they should be working day-in and day-out with the man who is meant to make them better?
McGregor would be a perfect example. When Deila arrived, he was one of the brighter points.
Scoring in games against Legia Warsaw and Maribor last season when the experienced players were running around with their hair on fire. McGregor was expected to kick on but what happened? Nothing. We basically haven’t seen him for a year before he scored against Ajax.
And like I have said, this is not a kid. Just like Stuart Armstrong, Gary Mackay-Steven, Ciftci, James Forrest, Boyata, Simunovic, Allan, Bitton, Johansen and Leigh Griffiths are not children.
They are between 20 and 25, so don’t give me inexperienced guff.
I like Deila. He’s a nice fella but some of the stuff he says just has you shaking your head.
He’s talking about being ready for the Champions League next season. On what evidence?
Certainly nothing we are seeing on the pitch. He says if you don’t see it, you don’t see the big picture. Well the big picture I see is a team lacking leadership and constantly making the same mistakes while being mentally weak.
He has to take a large portion of blame for that because the signings have been, in general, crap.
However, a bit of me believes few managers could do a better job if they were forced to work with the same blinkered transfers policies and boardroom approach.
It might balance the books but it’s also sinking the club out of sight in European terms. Negligence and naivety. A combination with truly horrifying results.[/quote]
I felt Sutton was too quick to critiise Deila early on but he’s improved no end as an analyst.
The recruitment policy is a joke. It’s mostly nothing to do with Ronny but he’s been happy to accept it and not challenge it and it’s a recipe for disaster. Sutton basically sums it up in that article - we can’t keep acquiring unproven talent and expect them to turn into gems. We have been fairly successful at some of this - Bitton, Wanyama, Forster, Van Dijk etc but it’s no base to build an entire team around. Wanyama had time to develop in a team with established players like Ledley, Brown, Hooper etc.
And we’ve repeatedly failed to address our problem areas like centre back. It seems like your way out of Celtic is proving yourself too good. If you’re not good enough you become a utility player like Ambrose, Mulgrew etc. And we don’t replace those players because we can’t get rid of them. Ambrose, so palpably not good enough, remains a regular player year after year. Ridiculous situation. Matthews, Ledley, Hooper didn’t show as much as the top leavers but they did enough to attract a bit of interest so we waved them goodbye.
But the failings on the pitch are more of Ronny’s concern and his system is failing really badly. I don’t subscribe to the notion that there’s a single formation better than all others are one worse than all others. But you do need to have some imagination and versatility. We’re playing the same stale formation every game and it’s predictable and ineffective.
For two seasons now we’ve been brutal defensively. We don’t have great defenders now, but last season we had 2 centre backs who were perfectly capable and 2 or 3 decent or above decent full backs. We were exposed by every single team who tried to attack us. Because we’re obsesses with a 4-2-3-1 formation, playing 2 midfielders who aren’t brilliant defensively and 3 attacking midfielders who do no defending (and often very little attacking).
We have Griffiths alone up front in a role he’s not perfectly suited to. A good finisher but he’s nothing else. Put him alongside another striker and he might be far more threatening - and he might even learn a few things about linking up play.
I don’t understand why Stokes doesn’t get near the first team. He’s not the panacea for our problems, but McGregor, Mackay-Steven, Armstrong, Forrest get so many more chances to disappoint. None of them work hard enough off the ball, they offer no protection to our full backs (who are frequently caught too far forward) and they aren’t scoring or creating enough chances. To excel in that role where you don’t need to track back you need to be ripping teams apart - just filling up numbers by playing as a right winger achieves nothing.
I’m not suggesting we should always play 4-4-2 or always play 2 up front or anything like it. But we shouldn’t persist with a system that isn’t working, that’s isolating a striker who is really poor in general play, that is exposing our defence to far too much, that isn’t even controlling possession. We’re not even getting the 3 in midfield that the formation is supposed to allow you to do. We often come up against a 2 man midfield in the SPL and find it hard to get dominance because our #10 is too far forward and our defensive players are too far back. We don’t have anyone with real responsibility for the centre of the pitch.
I don’t see any of that changing.
- Ronny is still talking about filling the team with young Scottish talent (what young Scottish talent?)
- Promises about making the CL next season, echoing similar promises last year, but no talk of how to achieve that
- We are playing in a league where we have every opportunity to experiment, to innovate, to blood new talent. We do precious little of that. We just rotate the defence and the wingers and expect the formation will suddenly click.
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Stokes suspended for two weeks.
The blatant double standards afforded to Commons and Stokes lately make Deila seem like an awful cunt.
I’d be pissed off if chumps like Armstrong keep getting in the team ahead of me when I’m fit and ready to play.
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Deila, Lawwell and McGuinness out.
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