John Kennedy provided a refreshing confession last night as he took on Celtic’s post-match media duties.
Over the last few matches Neil Lennon has been describing single goal wins as outstanding, fantastic and wonderful to the belief of fans watching from the outside of a season that has rarely been far from disasters door.
There has been many failings since the wheels came off in October but without question the biggest failing has been in central defence and especially from set-pieces and cross balls.
Shane Duffy or Nir Bitton have usually been involved, or not involved when Aberdeen scored three, twice Livingston have scored two goals with Hibs 2-0 up at Easter Road before Celtic salvaged a draw. Behind the defence Vasilis Barkas was left wondering about what he had signed up for.
Over the recent winning run Stephen Welsh and Kris Ajer have formed something of an understanding flanked by two genuine full-backs.
Losing two goals in five matches is more like the form of title challengers, for much of this season it has seemed like Celtic needed to score twice in order to get a draw.
After beating Aberdeen 1-0 last night Kennedy told the Daily Record about some of the frustrations of this season.
When it’s 1-0 teams are always going to throw everything at it on set plays and crosses into the box but we stood really strong, we defended the box really well. We got lots of numbers in there and saw the game out, which was important for us.
There are two sides to it, one is our attacking play in terms of how we controlled the game and secondly the area we’ve not been so good in this year.
We can’t shy away from that, in terms of our defensive game we’ve probably leaked too many goals, especially at set plays but you saw second half that the boys were very aggressive in terms of how we defended.
A couple of times we dropped deeper than we had to and allowed a bit of pressure in our box but you can certainly see them putting their head on things, blocking thing, and most importantly getting bodies around the box where you can recover balls.
Next up for the new look defence is a trip to bottom of the table Ross County on Sunday.