The cinch Scottish Premiership begins this weekend. Celtic start at 8pm tonight with a trip to Tynecastle.
Starfelt is available and going by Ange’s comments I think he’ll start. Bitton returns from suspension and seems likely he’ll start too. Ange is concerned about the fitness of the team (wants to bring in more sports scientists and conditioning experts) and they’re the two real changes he can make immediately.
I wonder if we’ll see Bitton playing in midfield. Seems unlikely as he hasn’t played there but Murray and Welsh dropping out for Bitton and Starfelt is a big enough change to make.
Furuhashi might make the bench. I think he’s available but today is his first day with the squad so hard to think he’d feature much. Maybe a Scotty Sinclair type debut off the bench at Tynecastle.
“I think that’s fair [to say the team tired badly in Denmark],” he said. “It did take a lot out of them the other night, for some of them it was an enormous effort to play 120 minutes. But looking at them this morning and talking to them, the players have certainly recovered and bounced back well.
“We are limited a little bit in terms of how much I can rotate. We do get Carl Starfelt who is available, and obviously Nir Bitton who wasn’t available the other night, which will help in a couple of positions at least. For the rest of it, we’re going to have to go with largely the same group of players.”
These conditioning issues indicate that uber-manager Postecoglou’s revamping of the club will not be restricted to the first-team squad “People have asked me about bringing my own people in, well, it’s not the coaching area that I think we need that extra support in,” he said. “I think the areas we need are particularly in the conditioning area and the sports science area, we need some more people in to help us. It’s going to be a punishing schedule.
Kyogo on the bench. Montgomery looked badly out of his depth the other night. I hope our focus on getting a right back doesn’t blind us to our glaring inadequacies at left back.
on the radio/internet? BBC says no rights coverage in Ireland on TuneIn radio