Ange Postecoglou couldn’t be happier with the progress of Alexandro Bernabei.
The young defender has started Celtic’s last two SPFL matches and looked perfectly at home, defending soundly, overlapping and combining with team-mates and crucially providing two assists to Giorgos Giakoumakis.
Bernabei appears to have the ideal game to play Angeball but unlike a year ago he is being slowly introduced to the team.
In the opening SPFL match of last season Carl Starfelt and Kyogo Furuhashi were chucked in at Tynecastle as soon as they came out of quarantine. At Ibrox Josip Juranovic made his debut out of position without a full week of training under his belt.
Last season’s forced evolution has made this season’s squad a very different proposition with Postecoglou looking forward to seeing more and more of Celtic’s first Argentinian signing.
Discussing Bernabei with the Daily Record the Celtic boss said:
He is one we are really excited about. He is 21, it’s his first time out of Argentina and I didn’t want to throw him in and overwhelm him immediately. We see a really bright future for him and we wanted to integrate him slowly.
Alexandro wants to learn and he has a real appetite for improvement. We have been able to be measured, but there was never any doubt in my mind that he could make an impact and you will see that from now on.
We have also had the luxury of not needing to throw him in, as Greg Taylor has had an outstanding season. We have been able to ease Alexandro in gradually. I wanted to give him time because it is a big change for him, even with the language. That would be a challenge for any young player coming over.
If you throw him into a competitive environment it can be a sink or swim scenario. I didn’t see the need to do that. I felt it was better to get him in gradually and you can see him getting better in training all the time.
He has the respect of his team-mates and he has improved with every game he has played. We still have 28 league games plus cups to go, so Alexandro will play his part.
He has a couple of assists in his last two games and that was part of the attraction with Alexandro. He is exciting going forward and in the modern game, if you can get defensive players with good attacking outputs, they are great assets.
We certainly saw that when we scouted Alexandro and we knew that he could be good for us going forward, but he’s also improving the defensive side of his game
We have worked closely with him and he’s taking it all on board. We are probably the least surprised by how played against Hibs. He’s only a young guy and there is more to come.
With eight matches to be played over the 24 days before the World Cup break Postecoglou has two strong options to play at left-back.