Well into his second season as manager of Celtic it seems that elements of the Scottish media can’t come to terms with a manager that has complete belief in his system.
Month by month Ange Postecoglou’s side has improved, the players are more familiar and confident with the system, belief has grown further on the back of results and success.
On the final day of the transfer window last summer Jota and Cameron Carter-Vickers brought more definition to the side.
Celtic performed reasonably in the Europa League, even against teams from Spain and Germany the manager failed to park the bus, something of a tradition for Scottish clubs.
Since January the revolution has been on acceleration- Matt O’Riley, Reo Hatate and Giorgos Giakoumakis made a big impact as Celtic powered to the title.
Strangely some members of the media still need to be assured that on the eve of the biggest match of his Celtic range Postecoglou isn’t about to pull down the shutters and play for a narrow defeat.
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If there’s something that you can guarantee me tomorrow night that if I play this way, you’ll guarantee will minimise risk, then it doesn’t exist.
Any system you play, any approach you take, there’s inherent risk. But sometimes, the greater the risk, the greater the opportunity. Because we’re trying to do things a little bit differently. We don’t want to be like every other team. With that, there’s always the possibility that you’ll stumble.
That’s fine. I’ve stumbled in the past. The important thing is you dust yourself off and keep going. It’s not about being confident of winning. All we can do is control our performance. Every game we play, we try and play the game a certain way and be the best we can be in every game.
That’s what we’ve done in every game so far, it’s what we did last year and it’s what we’ll try and do tomorrow night. We’ll try and play our football, be the best team we can be and the end result is often a consequence of strong performance.
There’s no point in us thinking about winning, losing or any other result. The first thing we want to do is make sure we perform, because we’re playing against a top football team with fantastic players and a brilliant manager. What we want to do is go out there and offer the best of ourselves to measure up against that.
Tomorrow night Real Madrid and everyone else will discover that Postecoglou is a man of his word.
In my 50 years of supporting Celtic we have always had to put up with a based media and we have just accepted but Ange is different. He is without doubt the best I can remember(too young for Mr Stein) at putting them in their place. The football we play is breath taking and it is a joy to be a Celtic fan and we have hope in a European run.