Greg Taylor has hit back at the diving claims made about him by Jim Goodwin.
Late on during Celtic’s win over St Mirren the full-back burst into the penalty box to receive a pass when Ryan Flynn raised his arms to Taylor’s shoulders with contact from his feet as well.
It was one of those soft ones, or silly ones made by a player under pressure but the contact was obvious but enough to disrupt Taylor’s run with referee Don Robertson pointing to the penalty spot.
Reacting to Goodwin’s claims, Taylor told the Daily Record:
It’s not true and I was disappointed, to be fair, because there was more than one contact in the move. I’m not someone who would go down easy and, unfortunately, he’s felt the need to comment. I’ve never been accused of that in the past. We had a game to focus on (against St Johnstone) and I tried to turn my attentions to that.”
Asked if he was hurt by Goodwin’s words, Taylor added: “No, if it’s not true. He was maybe hurting as they had lost the game, I don’t know, you’d need to ask Jim that. It’s certainly something I couldn’t be accused of. I don’t want to label it as anything, it was Jim’s words.
“He felt the need to speak out on it and certainly I didn’t believe that to be the case. And I don’t think many others did. It is what it is. It was a foul, it was a penalty, so I’ll draw a line under it now and, hopefully, I won’t speak about it again.”
Goodwin does seem overly fond of delivering the sort of comments that make for easy headlines with the Taylor incident coming the day after Albian Ajeti had an appeal against a two match suspension for simulation overturned.
After Odsonne Edouard scored from the penalty spot St Mirren lost another two goals within three minutes. On Saturday Goodwin’s defence kept a clean sheet in the 0-0 draw away to Aberdeen.
