This week coming, we’re taking a trip into the next round of the Champions League.
The way has been smoothed for us considerably by an excellent away win in the first leg of our current tie, and that will mean that this week’s fixture should be little more than a formality. Hopefully we’ll score a few goals and head into the next one with some momentum.
We’ll need it because the next round will be harder. Who can even say what the one after that will hold for us should we get there? The passage seems straightforward in that there is no team likely to face us that we should automatically fear, but we will need to be at our best just the same.
What I like is that we have now become unpredictable. I’ve written here a couple of times in the last week or two about how we look like we’ve got a new tactical system; in fact, I heard yesterday that the tactical changes are even more potent than I first realised. We have as many as five separate formations to cycle through and Brendan wants the players drilled in coping with all of them. If true that’s a significant, and exciting, change of pace.
When our team gets rolling it will be hard to stop; we need to take full advantage of our home ties in the coming Champions League campaign. We have to try and make Celtic Park a fortress once again. The biggest disappointments in recent years, above the away match disasters, have been the games against Monchengladbach and Anderlecht at home.
We were well capable of winning both.
We didn’t win either, and that’s one of the things that is going to have to change.
It would be good if we could get through these qualifiers without losing silly away goals as well. Last year we performed brilliantly to get a 1-0 win away from home against Rosenborg, and then when we destroyed Astana at home I thought we had it licked, only for us to lose four games in the away leg, a performance that was head-scratching and plain awful, as was the loss of 18 goals in the group stages, not to mention dropping three in St Petersburg.
I find it incredible we’ve not significantly reinforced the defence, but even with what we have we should have been doing better than that.
Over the next few weeks we’re going to find out how much this team has grown. I am actually optimistic, but we’re also going to need to strengthen key areas. This week will be relatively straightforward. The road ahead will not be.