Ange Postecoglou

Celtic boss Ange Postecoglou tells BBC Sportsound: "It’s a game we should have won and we created enough opportunities to do that, we dominated the game.

“We just lacked a little bit of composure and quality in the front third to score the goal we needed. The whole game we created good opportunities and we needed to be stronger in those areas to take them.

“The expectations of this club are that you go in every game to win and the players are disappointed - as they should be. We’ll pick ourselves up, get into training tomorrow and get on with it."

On returning players and resting players: “We’ll see, it’s unlikely that anyone will definitely come back in, there are a couple who are close but we’ll see#.

"No one was rested tonight, I don't know where that came from, I don't rest players. If they want a rest they can have a rest when they are 45. Everyone who wasn't playing tonight was unavailable as they were either suspended or injured."

 

Really, really frustrated that we find ourselves further behind in the title race.

It’s the teams that we’ve lost points against that’s really disappointing. We should be leading this race.

Got to balance it out with where we were when Ange took over. Plenty thought we’d be miles behind.

Goes without saying but we need to win Sunday, beat Hibs and then beat the Huns. If we do, it’s game on.

 

ANGE Postecoglou tonight admitted that Celtic could be without both Kyogo Furuhashi and Tom Rogic when they play Rangers on February 2.

The SPFL have bowed to the wishes of the vast majority of cinch Premiership clubs and agreed to move the winter break forward.

The top flight will now shut down after the matches on Boxing Day.

The Old Firm game at Parkhead that was scheduled to be played on January 2 will now take place exactly a month later.

But the new date means that Australia internationalist Rogic and Japanese striker Furuhashi will be on international duty with their countries.

Asked if the pair would be away when the Rangers game is played after Celtic had been held to a 0-0 draw with St Mirren in Paisley last night, Postecoglou said: “If they get called up they will be.

“There is a lot of violin playing around the place, we are not going to be one of them.

"I am very supportive of our club's stance. It makes sense to me to use the natural break.

"I have said all along that fans are an integral part of this game.

"If having that break gives us a chance, without guarantees, to get them back in it's much better.

"I don't like playing closed doors - fans are an important part home and away.”

Celtic now trail Rangers by six points in the Premiership following their draw with an understrength St Mirren side at the SMISA Stadium.

Postecoglou added: "We should have won the game. We created enough chances and we dominated but we lacked quality in the final third to finish them off.

"It wasn't a night when everything went right for St Mirren because we did a lot wrong. It wasn't all good defending, it was also our own finishing.

"We had enough chances to win a few games. If you don't take them, that's what you get. It's not down to personnel. We had good chances for the guys out there to take them.

"We should have won and if we'd more composure and people had been stronger in their intent, we would have done.

“That’s been evident for a long time now, that we need a stronger squad. That’s not just tonight. That’s not why we didn’t win tonight, we should have won tonight, we had enough of the ball, we had enough possession, we had enough chances, irrespective of all the other factors.

“Even if we hadn’t won tonight it doesn’t stop the fact that at the moment we have got 11 guys who are injured. Any squad would have been challenged by that.

“But for me I still think we haven’t had enough quality in the squad to be able to rotate players through a heavy schedule. That isn’t surprising. It was always going to take more than one window to get the squad we wanted. That is logical. Tonight doesn’t change things.”

 

Tonight was just another result of the steady downsizing undertaken since Rodgers’ first season.

Sevco, our nearest competitors, will never find themselves playing a youth winger up front, as they have first team players coming out their ears in every position.

Ange has to push the board to back him heavily in January, otherwise he’d be as well walking now.

 

…and/or adapt his style of play so that learning it doesn’t cause almost literally half of our already threadbare squad to do their hamstrings bang smack in the middle of the most lucrative league campaign in well over a decade.

There’s no defending the corrupt board, but Ange is shooting himself in the foot. It simply shouldn’t be this hard to balance implementing a style and managing to keep up in the league. He does need a stronger squad, but the current one might not be 6pts behind the Huns at this stage if the manager weren’t insisting on putting them through the football equivalent of a Tough Mudder every training session.

 

Ffs. No Kyogo! Forrest will no doubt be injured, we will just need to hope Jota is ok and that Maeda is some sort of player.

 

Our 11 men are better than their 11 men. Our best attacking players are out purely because they've been run into the ground rather than rotated. He said it himself tonight, he doesn't rest players. I hope that's hyperbole because it's an absolutely moronic strategy otherwise.

It's difficult to attribute all our woes to the board not splashing the cash when we're looking at a squad assembled for several times the cost of St Mirren or Livi or Hearts. The manager has to shoulder at least some of the responsibilty for how we've performed. And he needed to be more efficient with the squad available to him than he has been. That's a fair criticism.

 

More chance of Maeda missing the game than Kyogo, both him and Hatate in the provisional squad although they’ve only selected domestic players recently so they might be omitted if they signed for us

 

Surely not ...

 

He hasn’t rotated as much as he wanted to because the * he’d need to replace them with was on show tonight.

Anytime he’s rotated and gave the likes of Johnston, Moffat, Montgomery, McCarthy, Soro, Shaw etc. Gametime they haven’t just not been up to scratch they’ve absolutely stunk the place out.


Our best players are out injured because the backups are so bad that they aren’t viable options. There’s an absolute chasm from out starting 11 to our bench.

And that’s taking into account that our starting 11 needs severely strengthened.

 

Really worries me that Ange will by now have realised the true scale of the problem.

Long term legends who only perform ( or even play )when they fancy it, a number of low-cost buys to bolster the "playing" squad numbers.

Expensive but useless Greek imports like Barkis and Giokoumakis.

He might think...f this for a game of soldiers.. and start looking around for other options

I hope not

 

Yet it happens to every team who have such a big shift to a high pressing style.

Liverpool under Klopp, Bayern and City under Pep. PSG under Tuchel. And they were teams at the highest level taking over from top class coaches.

Ange was taking over a team led by a fat unprofessional waste of space drunk.

 

Who?

 

Hard to rotate players when the backups are also injured..

Also it's funny, people went off their nut when he brought off Jota and Kyogo against Bayer, yet now he's "running" them into the ground?

Can't win

 

Teams like Rangers get 3 corners against us and score one goal from them. We get 10 corners and score nothing.
Yes we lack some height, but the truth is we do not attack the ball and remain flat footed and static waiting for the ball to come over. We do not make any early or late runs into the box. We make it easy for their defenders to clear because we do not create chaos in the box. How many penalties have we won in such situations ? None.

Billy McNeill scored many goals from corner kicks in games. We have players similar in height in Scales, Starfelt, Welsh, Henderson and Shaw. They need to be trained to take strategic positions at corners and to then come to the ball powerfully and score.

Is that stupidity on our part, arrogance, no one telling players what they need to be doing ? I think all of these things ! We need some old school football in this regard.

In 2004 Greece won the Nations Cup partly because of how good they were at scoring headed goals from corner kicks and crosses. It was not by chance. You need to repeat the drill at training until you get it right. Then keep doing it. That includes taking free kicks outside the box, and shooting practice each session.

Goals are hard to come by and you need developed skill to score them. No team worth their salt will roll over for you.

Trappatoni as coach at Juventus especially stressed at training, the need to be clinical in front of goal because chances would be few in games in Italian football.

 

That's why you rotate, so your starting 11 stay healthy. It's better to bring in 1 or 2 benchwarmers against St Mirren out of choice than having to play 5 or 6 together out of necessity. The situation we're in didn't need to be this dire, we should be able to step down in 1 or 2 positions against bottom-half SPFL teams. If we can't, there's a problem.

And here's the bit of the 'we need to strengthen' argument that irritates me. Aye, we need to strengthen to challenge Rangers and have more depth. But do we really need better players to beat St Mirren? Or Livi? No, because we already massively outgun them in every area. Ange should be able to manage the squad he's got to consistently get results against these teams. If we need to strengthen to do that, it's to offset managerial deficiencies rather than make up a shortfall in the relative strength of the squads.

 

It’s interesting reading all these expert opinions on what Ange should or shouldn’t do. So many well credentialed football managers on here.

 

* me, the Leeway ange gets from some of our support is ridiculous. He must have known the size of the task he had in front him when he took the job and how he is totally exempt from any of the blame after results like livi at home and tonight is completely beyond me.

 

Kinda what a forums for mate people giving their opinions… don’t think anyone on here thinks they’re experts.

 

Billy McNeill scored 37 goals in 789 total career games for Celtic that is 1 goal every 21 games roughly on average. Not exactly as prolific as you make him out to be from corners especially as I think I can safely assume not all 37 of his goals were headers from set pieces. The biggest reasons why we don't score off set pieces corners in particular and are vulnerable on them defensively is that we are very short height wise that is just a fact and it hurts us on both ends of the park. Attacking wise you add in the fact that we do not have a player right now on the team who can deliver a quality service on a consistent basis. It really is that simple. No idea why you even mentioned Liam Shaw and Henderson either as they have barely played a minute all season. Scales has had very little game time either.
You can actually see that the fact that we struggle with corners is something that Ange is well aware of and is working on as we try various short routines an awful lot more recently then we used to do as well as serving balls into the box.