Tomorrow night, Giorgios Giakoumakis will make his debut for Celtic in the League Cup against Raith Rovers, and when he pulls on the boots for that game a lot of fans are going to breathe a sigh of relief as we get some additional firepower into the team.
Forrest and Jullien are still a little way away.
They are expected to be back “post international break” which means that they’ll be in training for Celtic in early October.
We expect that Kyogo will be fit by then as well, so little by little we’re getting up to full strength.
But in the here and now, it’s good that our big striker, who let’s not forget finished as top scorer in Holland last year, is about to take his first bow in front of the Celtic fans. It’s a big moment for him and for us. It’s a moment that makes us a little stronger.
We badly need that additional strength up front.
Our playing system benefits from having options, and when we watch this guy we’ll know if we finally have the target man football we’ve been so obviously crying out for in years gone by.
Would he have made a difference at the weekend?
Put it this way, a guy who can physically dominate in the penalty box and who might have gotten onto the end of some of those painfully ineffectual crosses would have been a game-changer.
Raith won’t be able to play like that.
It’s a cup game, at Celtic Park, and they will have to attack us to go through.
So they won’t sit back with eleven men behind the ball and play for a point.
We’re not going to figure this out tonight, we’ll need to wait for the weekend or, more importantly, for Aberdeen on 3 October.
Yet we will learn two things about this guy; how he plays in front of goal and how he fits into the style as Ange sees it.
We must assume he’s suited to that style or he wouldn’t have been signed, but perhaps he’s actually here to let us play more than one way.
Whichever it is, his debut seems like it’s taken forever to come about.
It will be interesting to see how he does in a Celtic strip. He has a lot to live up to.
I really do hope he offers that strength and target man option up front. But I hope he can show the support that he’s more than just that. I live in hope. HH
“It’s a cup game, at Celtic Park, and they will have to attack us to go through.
So they won’t sit back with eleven men behind the ball and play for a point.”
No but they might well just sit in and pray for a replay (or pens or whatever the hell it is in this competition) – never underestimate the ability of diddy teams to refuse to play football!
I hope this guy is an Ange signing and not one of Dermot’s “gems”…makes you wonder if Lawwell really did buy those duds in the past or if it was at the behest of the moustache-twirling git…?