Official Rangers V Celtic match chat thread

He has players mainly for WGS's system (which worked most of the time). He has some sort of vision in his head but not the players for that system. I personally doubt our club will ever purchase the sort of players to allow us to play like Arsenal or whoever. Anyway, as you say, this is what we have until the window. I think the solution is to go back to a simple solid if boring 4-4-2 with the CM and CDs sitting deeper like WGS had them set out. That system works better than what we have now. Basically Mowbray should not move to an open system till he has the players for it (got to be next season if ever). The players he needs are 2 pacey CBs, some sort of playmaker and two fast lethal striker with great touch.

That little lot will cost about 30 million pounds. IMO he will have to sell (and get top prices for) Broony, Skippy and Artur to part fund all of that. Broony and Skippy were good in WGS's system but wouldnt work in Moggas flowing football ideals as well. Any money he can get for Mick would helo too. With Zaluska in the wings I dont think we can afford not to take any huge bid for Artur if we are to finance Mogga.

 

It depends how Rangers do. If it comes down to OF games I am not confident. Manager after manager has had to learn the hard way that pretty football does not beat Rangers. They are masters at playing physical and negative and hitting on the break. They have been for at least 15 years. Managers all eventually realise this needs countered by a more physical and tactical approach.

 

when your up your up . when your down , old saying some people have it in for paddy , paddy did ok put on at deep end 2,1 down. for the 20 so mins he was on he made naismith look * just look at the replay. don,t forget paddy was carrying at knock , as i said when your up your up, people with short memorys.

 

I wouldn't worry too much I'm very confident that Celtic will win the league this year. What today underlined is that certain players e.g. Brown, McManus, Loovens(deserves a bit more time alongside a good centre half), Maloney, McDonald, Samaras and Wilson simply aren't good enough and should be shipped out as soon as. Rangers have a champions league campaign and have a 1st 11 squad but beyond that its pretty poor. If they lose any key players then there is no one well equipped to come in. So over the course of the season they WILL drop a lot of points due to European commitments.
Tony Mowbray has brought in 4 new players so far and I think that they are better than what we had before i.e. Strachans team. The reality is that when Strachan had his team guys like McDonald, Naylor, Caldwell etc were in the team every week with no pressure to maintain their place. They played games in a casual manner with no real agression or passion to win. This attitude is still present in these players at the moment which was shown up today. However there is a slight difference as these guys KNOW that they are out the door. We have to stick with the team until the Jan window and hope that Tony can improve their attitudes until then and get them playing with some vigour and a wee bit of bite if need be e.g. Kenny Miller pushing Loovens for the goal. That shouldn't be allowed to happen again. I believe Tony will give the team some harsh words and some home truths will be drilled home. It will take some time to rid the team of Strachans sloppy attitude with which the team played. Stick with it, Mowbray will turn it round but it may take a wee bit of time and the defending won't get better overnight. In Jan a centre half and a striker would solve a lot of our problems I reckon. What do you guys think?

 

I was at the game today so I wanted to see Skys 30 mins highlights package to make my full comments on the game, thought it would only be fair.

The first twenty minutes of almost every league game this season has been the same we seem to be very slow out the starting block and I think Artur was a big fault for the first goal he showed Miller 3 quarters of the goal from a positional sense it was diabolical. Loovens inability to win a header and then be muscled out the ball by Kenny Miller is laughable to be honest.

Kenny Millers celebration for his second goal should receive a fine the dirty wee cu*t that he is.

Had a stone waller turned down by Maloney in this time and he missed a very good opportunity too but thats just what I come to expect from Maloney (more on him later in the post).

From about 20 mins onwards Celtic started to make their mark on the game and I thought Zizi looked very assured on the ball and looked the part especially for his first game in such a long time, drew the foul brilliantly for the penalty. I think after McGeady scored we should have pushed on and got the equaliser before half time but it wasn't to be.

Second half it was just a wave of green and white on the rangers goal and I think McGeady was awesome to be honest really showed how lucky we are to have a player of his quality in our side.
I think we would all agree that Maloneys attempt was the best chance we had and to be honest how a professional footballer can't finish that is beyond me and far too often the big chance comes to him in big games and he blows it and it does not help our situation any (Rapid Vienna comes to mind).
Would like to see Wilsons booking again Skysports never showed it, he had no need to go down so would be interesting to see.

Whittaker almost gave McDonald a rear naked choke in the second half as well.
Some half chances that maybe with a little luck we could have converted but that was all I think we missed Fox's dead ball skills today with Naylor taking all our set pieces then later on Maloney.

Laffertys challenge on ZiZi was a disgrace and he should have went off for that alone never mind all the other fouls he made (reminded me of Big Jan to Amdy Faye a couple years back). Novos challenge on Wilson was a disgrace as well, That we * dived then smiled at us then started grabbing his balls while gesturing towards the Celtic fans. Then the Celtic fans started singing die in your sleep and we know where you stay.

It was a good performance bar the first twenty minutes from the Bhoys today a bit more class, luck and composure and we could have won that but aww well its not the end of the world. We are still top of the league, we still have 3 games to have some revenge and hopefully Mowbray will start to grow into these big games and become a bit more tactically aware.

Good game. Bad and ultimately harsh result.

Hail Hail

 

Good post.


Very frustrating especially when we dominated the match. Like I said before the match, I thought we'd dominate possession and they'd hit us on the break. That's pretty much what happened. Really unhappy with slack defending and still being top of the league is no consolation for me.

Right at the start of the match I said that we were giving the ball away too much and far too easily. I wish Mowbray would set the team up to play defensively for the first 20 minutes or so. Our defenders end up playing a high line because of our attacking style which means we're suspect to getting caught on the break which happened twice yesterday. They don't have the pace to get back that quickly and I think that's why we've conceded so many early goals this season.

Brown needs to be dropped. Bar once winning the ball in a dangerous area yesterday, I fail to see what else he brings to the team.

I was pleased with how Zhi played. He looked very composed under pressure. I also thought that McGeady did well especially seeing as how closely marked he was. However, Rangers were very well organised and after they scored their goals, we found them too difficult to break down.

As for your point about Maloney missing that chance, I think he just needs one to go in to give him a bit of confidence. He should be able to kick on from there.

 

I honestly can't see why anyone can say that that was a good performance. Maybe it looked better on TV than it did at the game but I felt really let down by the performance.

We have a * defense who gifted 2 goals to Kenny * misser with Loovens getting bullied off the ball by the wee rat. We have a midfield who lack the fight and spirit needed at places like Ibrox. They were thundering into challenges and bullying us throughout the game and we seemed to just let them.

After the penalty we played alright and I thought that the second half would bring us a goal at least but sadly was let down again. We created * all and I can't remember McGregor having too much to do right in front of the Celtic fans. Skippy kept getting caught offside. There was no real threat from our forwards even when Samaras came on and to be honest I'd have done away with the 4-5-1 after we went 2 down not kept it up for so long.

So in short I felt shortchanged by our team once again. No-one will convince me that that was a decent performance by a Celtic side. I don't know the stats but to me shots on goal are too few and far between. That together with the * that gets offered up by our defense doesn't make for a good team.

 

i still have plenty reasons to be optimistic.


i thought we were the better team and it seems almost everybody agrees, the only reason we lost was two stupid mistakes from centre backs.


mcmanus and caldwell both have to go. i dont blame loovens, he has more pressure on him knowing that whoever is partnering him at the back is a liability. we need to get o'dea back and play loovens and o'dea.



maloney is also * me off now, 4 clear cut chances in his last two games and he scores none of them. get him tae f**k and start playing mccourt regularly please. when paddy came on he seemed to be the only player capable of making a killer pass into the box, but at that stage rangers had two banks of 5 and so it was almost impossible for him to get accurate enough.


the maloney penalty as we all know was a clear penalty, you wont get a more obvious penalty than that in football. that would have been 1-1 and i think we'd have gone on to win the game.

the second penalty shout, its a foul. but in this day and age you dont get those types of fouls in the box, which is ludicrous, but thats always the way with referees so cant complain about that one really.

the zheng zhi penalty was indeed a penalty, zheng i thought had a good game by the way.

I don't think i need to say much on Whittakers assault on McDonald...We all know that should have been a penalty.

anyway, we are the better team and with the addition of robbie keane in january we'll easily win the league :whistle:

 

i agree with almost everything you said there except playing mccourt over maloney IMO mccourt is rubbish sure he scored 2 great goals against falkirk and st mirren but what else did he do in the st mirren game?and what did he do when he came on yesterday..absoluetly nothing he think he can just run through the rangers defence if any1 isnt celtic quality its mccourt id give mcginn a run

 

Other than the two goals, Loovens had a decent game, but he still has to take a share of the blame for them scoring.

McCourt doesn't have the fitness to play for 90 mins against Rangers. When he came on and made a forward pass, I watched him expecting him to make a run into the box. But he just stopped and put his hands on his waist. It was in the last 15 minutes if I remember correctly. My point is that McCourt just doesn't have the engine to run for 90 minutes in a match of that intensity.

I would be very surprised if we bought Robbie Keane.

 

I know it was just a joke i used on another forum i post on, the ocs there were giving it all lip so i stuck that wie line in...

 

Gotcha.

I've just seen several Celtic fans say this to me since yesterday so I thought that a small number really expected us to buy him in January.

 

why replace maloney? atleast hes getting into scoring positions, whats mcgeady doing? why not replace mcgeady? im not saying we should, but i dont understand all the criticsim maloneys taking i think hes been great all season. when he gets the ball he looks like he'll create more than ayone else we have

 

I think McGeady was awesome to be honest really showed how lucky we are to have a player of his quality in our side.

maybe i watched a different game. maybe i just don't like mcgeady. are you taking the *, i thought mcgeady was disappointing to say the least. for a player ' of his quality ' what did he actually do? ok he scored the pen(just). what else did he do?

 

* Bless the Pope.