After our 7-1 defeat/battering/hammering, to be expected result away to Paris Saint Germain, some people have been asking questions of Celtic and of our manager.
Why do fans accept losing, by such a high margin, to the elite European sides? Should we have bought more or better defenders? Did we need another goalkeeper? Is Brendan tactically naïve? Those are just a few of the questions that I have read on Twitter since the match.
I have deliberately called the result various things because you’ll see it as one of the above depending on what your expectations are. I had sent a text to a mate during the day and said that I expected PSG to score seven or eight against us so I would have to say that I’m not surprised by it.
Yes, it’s painful to watch but it was expected.
Some have said that it is not good enough for Celtic to lose by such a high margin. Maybe it’s not but how do we prevent the same thing from happening?
Some have pointed to individual errors in the big games that is costing us. I’ve never played football to any level before but I am of the opinion that we have so many errors because the players are not used to thinking so quickly.
As an example, take a domestic home game. The ball is with one of our defenders and they’ll have a few seconds to look around, control the ball then work out what they’re going to do with it.
They have nowhere near as much time against the likes of Barcelona, PSG and the other teams with huge amounts of cash to spend. That’s why I reckon that we see what looks like a lot of unforced errors.
The team who we expect to finish second in our group didn’t do too well against PSG either.
Bayern lost 3-0 and that was with despite having Kimmich, Sule, Javi Martinez & Alaba as their “defensive” players. Combined, these guys transfer value is over £100m.
In the PSG game, Celtics “defensive” players were KT, Jozo, Lustig and Boyata who were valued at less than £10m – I’ve taken the values of both squads from transfermarkt.co.uk
Straight off, I’d prob say that I value our above 4 as higher than 10m but the point is that they’re nowhere near the value or salaries of either Bayern or PSG.
When the Champions League draw was made, we hoped to be able to get into the Europa league, we are still in a position to get into that competition. Obviously that will depend on how the last match, against Anderlecht goes but we are where we hoped to be.
The management team have been fantastic in domestic football and the gap between that and Champions League is clearly too much for now. Will it ever change? I have no ideas if it will but I suspect it will eventually.
Fans of the bigger teams aren’t filling their stadiums for some of the European matches because they are fed up watching them play against and destroy the same teams each year.
Financial Fair Play will probably never happen as there’s not much chance of PSG players losing a few hundred grand a week so that they’re earning the same as ours. Conversely, we’re not likely to start paying a few hundred grand a week to players either.
The best hope that we have is that we can develop our own players and keep a hold of them for a while. We’ve already saw how difficult that can be though. In the last few seasons Fraser Forster, Virgil van Dijk and Victor Wanyama are three players who have left for a big transfer fee and a massive wage rise.
Had we been able to keep them, would we have won against PSG? I doubt we would have.
While we have guys like KT and Callum McGregor coming through the youth ranks at the club and we have them playing in the big games, we may well be able to improve.
This time next year, it’s no longer a new things for these guys to be involved in huge games.
That said, I doubt well improve enough to compete with the top teams. I don’t know how or if we ever will be able to compete against the best but I suppose it’s maybe a good idea to know our own place just now.
We are hopeful of a Europa League spot, which is what we always wanted and then we’ll see how we go against the teams there.
Given the amount of cash that is available, I’m happy enough to see us pick up a fortune, have some epic European adventures and then drop into the Europa league to see how we’ll get on.