Ange Postecoglou has stated that Celtic won’t ever get the violin out to feel sorry for themselves.
When 10 Premiership clubs voted to bring forward the winter break a whispering campaign was instantly launched suggesting that Celtic’s motivation was more to do with hamstrings than a pandemic and crowds being restricted to just 500 fans.
Hibs, Motherwell, Aberdeen and St Johnstone quickly spoke out in favour of bringing forward the winter break with the SPFL board going for a compromise by moving the break forward by two rounds of fixtures.
All clubs have grasped the extra time, players are resting, tests are being carried out with clubs slowly gearing up to resume activities on January 17 and 18.
Postecoglou knows what has been whispered about the SPFL decision but told the Glasgow Times that Celtic won’t duck any challenges thrown their way:
We had challenges. It would have been easy for me [to complain]…there is a helluva lot of violin-playing around the place, but I didn’t want us to be one of them. We are a big club. We will take whatever challenges are before us and not make excuses.
We could have made excuses from the first game when we were throwing in guys who hadn’t even met their team-mates yet but we took our licks, we took our punches, we got back up off the canvas and that’s what we’ll keep doing.
That’s the kind of club we want to be. Credit to the players and to the staff. [At McDiarmid Park], we had plenty of excuses, but if we didn’t get the job done, I wouldn’t be able to use many of them. I would be saying we were disappointed, as we were [against St Mirren].
It seems strange that Postecoglou is relating Celtic’s start to the season with bringing forward the winter break. The Australian took charge of Celtic on June 10 with the first European qualifier on July 20 with the SPFL opener on July 31, dates that were well known and not subject to change.
