Ange Postecoglou Shows Some Flexibility With His Surprise Celtic Team Selection.

So the big guy has some flexibility after all! Not such a zealot as we all worried about! Ange has taken a great decision today and dropped one of his two attacking midfielders for a more solid, defensive unit.

The guy who comes in is Nir Bitton.

It’s that name – rather than McCarthy or Soro – which might surprise some people.

Not me.

I always thought Nir was one of the best midfielders at the club and that it’s the move to central defence which blotted his Celtic copybook. The really critical mistakes he’s made at Celtic have been the kind you would expect from a midfielder playing out of position.

In his defensive midfield role he has been strong and steady.

It will be interesting to see how he performs in this role today for Ange.

Overall the team is a good one.

Kyogo plays up front alongside his partners in Jota and Abada; with these guys at the tip of the spear I suspect Aberdeen will have too much to handle. This is the day we set down that bag of bricks we’ve been carrying on our shoulders, that awful away record which we can start turning around with a victory.

The manager had a difficult decision to make here. He could either persist with a system which was way too attacking and way too light for the battle, or he could tweak it. Not ditch it, but tweak it, so that it was adaptive to the circumstances.

He has learned one of the critical lessons of midweek, as I suspected he might.

The man is evolving his system right in front of our eyes, and that’s not bad thing; indeed if we can marry a little pragmatism to his attacking ideas and to these attacking players we might yet get started on the kind of run which first puts people under pressure and then turns out their lights.

Today is an important day. See you on the other side.