Watt earns Frail praise
The striker started pre-season in Germany with Neil Lennon’s first team squad and featured as a substitute against Augsburg and Kickers Stuttgart.
On Saturday he was back with the development squad alongside Lewis Toshney, Rabui Ibrahim and Andre Blackman as Celtic slumped to a 2-0 defeat to host club Partick Thistle.
Twenty four hours later Celtic returned to Firhill in the third place play-off with Watt showing no mercy to his old club as he led the line with conviction.
“Tony showed what he can bring to the team, he was a threat every time he went forward,” coach Stevie Frail admitted.
“We asked the strikers to work hard defensively, Morten (Rasmussen) was carrying an injury which he played through, but Tony put in a lot of donkey work defensively and that pleased me.
“He’s strong, holds people off and we’re working hard with him. He’s still raw and fairly new to the club, he’s doing the work that we’re looking for.
“He was involved in goals, scored one himself and could have had another. He’ll take a lot of confidence from that.”
The difference between the Thistle and Airdrie United performances was stark.
After a defeat managers and coaches often claim that they can’t wait to get back in action- in Frail’s case he had just 24 hours to wait between the matches.
Sunday’s win over Aurdrie was closer to the standards set at the club but Frail couldn’t hide his frustration with the display he had witnessed the previous day.
“We were disappointed by the Thistle match,” he explained. “Not so much in losing the game, you can accept that if you lose and the team has given a decent account of themselves but on Saturday we had to question their attitude.
“Although it’s only pre-season we shouldn’t be doing that- they just didn’t work hard enough.
“I was really pleased with the way that they played against Airdrie. There was a lot of tired lads after the match but it was good to get the Thistle performance out of our system.
“Against Airdrie they did everything that was asked of them. There was a purpose about them, we had a team talk at Celtic Park after our pre-match and the players went out and performed.”
With the first team squad in Holland and u-20’s in Portugal Frail had to dig deep to fill the bench against Airdrie but wasn’t short changed by the quality he discovered.
“We had to take Bahrudin (Atajic) off, his legs had gone,” Frail added. “He had put in a good shift and I pushed Glenn into right midfield although he’s more of a full-back.
“He did well to get a header onto a good cross from Joe Chalmers, it was a great leap and to put it back across goal and to guide it in at the post was excellent.
“It was great to see Glenn plus Mark Barrowman, who is only 15, and Ross Madden out on the park.
“They never travelled with the u-20 squad to Portugal so I’ve had them training for a week and their attitude has been spot on.”
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