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Deila’s changes from afar

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Celtic_FansBless me Celts for I have blogged. It has been a few months since my last blog and this is due to a few different things.

I have a broken wrist and I’ve not saw a full game since I started my travelling last September.

I have, however, been able to keep up to date through this website, Ralph’s diary on etims and the podcasts on Hail Hail Media.

The main complaint in my last blog was about the focus on fitness of the Celtic players by Ronny Deila and the coaching staff. At the time of writing it, the results were not going very well and I was thinking that the results should improve then we could work on improving fitness.

From reading the interviews with our new recruits, it seems like fitness levels are massively improving at Celtic.

The first thing that I should mention is our cup semi final win against Sevco. In the past, we have had a few upsets against lower league opposition in cup games. I don’t need to remind any supporters about these upsets as I don’t want to be responsible for any self harming !

Against Sevco, it sounded like a very routine victory. They had no shots at goal, we seemed to play the game in first gear and if we had to, we’d have stepped it up a bit to put some pressure on them.

It’s important to remember that they are nowhere near the standard of team that we normally play against so I think we completed a professional performance.

At the time of the game, I was on an island in Laos and the best internet speed I could get was about 0.1mb so streaming wasn’t an option and neither was going old school and listening to the wireless.

The next thing that I have been pleased about is the transfer window – I’ve written in the past about how it’s annoying that we often exit a transfer window having sold some of our best players without replacing them with a player of equal quality.

This window has been different. We’ve kept a hold of Virgil, although, if he wants to go, then I think we should let him go. But only when it suits us, he has signed a contract so should hang around to honour it.

It may well be the case that he does move on to bigger and better wages and fair play to him if he does that but for now, I’m happy that we’ve kept a hold of him for the games v Inter and for the rest of the domestic season.

The two Dundee United guys coming in are showing the different road that we are taking – we’re happy to buy players that know what it’s like living in Scotland. They know the language etc.

Even small things like the climate must take a bit of time for some players to get used to. All of these can prevent players from coming in and making an immediate impact. At Celtic, players will be judged pretty quickly so it’s nice to know that our two most recent signings are ready to come in and start off without needing a few months to adjust.

I suppose the final thing, that I touched on at the start of this blog is the results. We need to ensure that we are winning games and we are doing that now. We’ve gone quite a few domestic games with victories and clean sheets.

The small parts of football that I have been able to watch on youtube usually just show the goals but a lot of the goals have been of a high standard. For me, the stand out was the Lustig’s diving header against Motherwell. The speed that we were able to get up the park at for that goal was fantastic to watch.

Is that goal a “Ronny Deila” goal? I don’t know because I haven’t saw enough of his Celtic team but the way things are now looking, I’m feeling way more positive now than I did at the time of writing my last blog.

I expect to be back home at some point towards the end of this year and back to the games. When that happens, I’ll be excited to see how we are playing under Ronny Deila.

The future is looking bright and well done to Ronny for proving a lot of us wrong. Maybe he’s not proved us wrong yet as nobody gets trophies in February but he has made a marked improvement and the support seems to be much more positive about things now.

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