I watched the second half of that Bristol City game this evening. Finished 0-0. Some brief thoughts, presented in bulleted form to ease reading, follow below:
Dembele, Johnston, Barkas and Soro all went off injured in the first half I think.
Our press is super aggressive. Moreso than we’d have seen under Rodgers even. And it worked very well, albeit against weaker opposition.
Even Ajeti was pressing hard for his 70 odd minutes on the pitch.
The centre backs and deeper midfielder (Shaw in the second half) were aggressive in following up the pitch and pressing players with their backs to goal.
Taylor was busy but Tayloresque in possession. We don’t have any other left or right backs of any ability at all seemingly.
Urhogide went out to right back at the end where he was fine but he actually looked good at centre back.
Interesting to see some of the hierarchy already with the clean slate for a new manager. The likes of Luca Connell seems to have disappeared from the picture again already and is behind Ewan Henderson and Montgomery and Moffat and guys like that in the pecking order.
Ewan Henderson won’t make it.
Dane Murray and Leo Hjelde both look like they might be involved a bit (two big lads) and both looked decent in flashes for their short time on.
The analysis on Celtic TV at half time was superb. The presenter and analyst are both big fans of all three new kits. Paul Cuddihy, to his credit, put his neck on the line and opted for the hoops as his pick of the three new designs.
Edouard is injured is he? What’s the story with Shved?
Barkas was selected to start but there was a late change to the lineup. I don’t know if he got injured in the warm up.
Johnston went off with a non-contact injury. Probably another hamstring or something. He’s riddled with injury.Dembélé got broken up in a dirty tackle. We barely have any fit wingers in the squad now. The new Israeli might be pitched in next week now.
Only by that utter moron Richard Wilson though who just constantly links Celtic with random Balkan players to try and gain traction on Twitter. He’s a bullshitter. And I’d give little to the latest Lovric links normally but they seem to have been mentioned elsewhere plus the social media following perhaps means something.
That back four is so bad. We don’t really have much chance in this tie at all. If we win we’d be in good shape with guaranteed group stage football in one of the competitions. But we have a really poor squad at the moment.
Ajeti will surely start anyway. Probably instead of Abadi (who seemed a decent player on Saturday I thought).
There seems to be a bit of upheaval in the Midget Land camp too. New manager, lost opening league game at weekend and a wantaway (great football term) striker refusing to play.
Ntcham, Bitton, Soro, Christie and Forrest were all scheduled to train yesterday after sitting out Saturday’s game. Some of them have barely kicked a ball in pre-season and we know already that Ange has a very defined way of playing. Will he trust the players that have been playing in his system, even though we’ve lost some players to injury and it would involve starting rookies like Montgomery? Or will he set that aside for now and call on those more experienced players despite having had much less game time? The disparity in quality between, say, Forrest and the other available right wing options is quite big. It’s a tricky one for the manager. Like we’ve all said, it’s an indictment on the board that he’s going into this game with such a threadbare squad.
