Davie Hay has highlighted Celtic’s misfiring strikers as partly to blame for the title loss. Interestingly Leigh Griffiths barely rates a mention from the former Celtic manager.
Neil Lennon finished the 2019/20 season with a glut of goals from Griffiths and Odsonne Edouard with the former Hibs striker looking back towards his best with a hat-trick in the final match of the season.
When the squad returned for pre-season training fans expected the team to pick up where they left off but that was far from the case.
Griffiths was so far out of condition that he wasn’t included on the training trips to Loughborough or France with the search for Plan B hindered by the fact that Plan A had fallen apart with transfer speculation around Edouard and Patryk Klimala unable to step up when given an opportunity.
Going into April Moi Elyounoussi is Celtic’s second top scorer in the SPFL with Griffiths, Klimala and Albian Ajeti barely having a 90 minute appearance to his name.
In an honest assessment with CQN Hay said:
Odsonne hardly stirred in the first part of the season. There may have been reasons for that, but he was not as sharp as he was in the previous campaign.
Was his head elsewhere? No doubt we will find out in time and, of course, he had a virus scare when he was in Paris in October with the France Under-21 squad. The virus may have taken its toll but he was not chasing the ball down as he should have done. That’s a basic part of any striker’s role in the team. It would be a wonderful to score a hat-trick in every game, but, alas, that player has yet to be born.
So, when you are not firing in goals by the bucketload, it is essential to do the dirty jobs, the covering and the challenging and making sure the opponents know you are on the pitch.
Odsonne kicked off the league season with a hat-trick against Hamilton Accies in the 5-1 win at the start of August. He did not score another goal from open play until he lobbed in the third in the 3-0 home victory over Dundee United on December 30. That’s an astounding fact.
Ajeti hasn’t looked like a £5million hitman and Klimala had a real opportunity to show what he could do in the match against Steven Gerrard’s side at Parkhead in October when he got the nod to start with Edouard in quarantine. He was chosen ahead of Griffiths which, upon reflection, was not a great decision.
I believe these three players have a combined total of 16 goals among them in this fairly awful season. That’s not good enough, nowhere near it.
