Celtic Deserved Their Win Last Night, But We Rode Our Luck In The Second Half.

Last night, everything was going right until half time. That was the only cloud on the horizon as we went into the break; that worrying habit we currently have of being less impressive in the second half of games.

It’s a pattern we repeated almost to the letter.

Where the Hell did our intensity go in that second spell?

Why did the performance levels drop so dramatically? If Hearts had scored the penalty, would we have been able to pull ourselves together and go for the winner? I think so, but I don’t know so for a fact, and that concerns me because we are a ball across the goal-line away from having had serious questions to answer this morning.

What causes these drops? This team is supposed to be fitter than it’s ever been, capable of chasing down an opposing side over 90 minutes. Remember what Ange told the players in his famous open mic session at training?

We work until the game is done.

If the opposition wants to slow down or zone out, that’s their problem because we’ll be all over them.

This Celtic team doesn’t look like it can do that yet.

We can go great guns for 45-60 minutes, but then it seems as if we run out of steam.

I understand that Ange hasn’t had a full campaign with these guys and that there are some of them who haven’t gotten up to speed with the pace he wants to set yet, but it’s been a trend for most of the season so far.

We cannot afford to let teams have a sniff in these matches.

Hearts were out of it until they got the goal, and whilst I wholly disagree with anyone who thought they “deserved” anything from a game in which we were utterly dominant for over an hour.

But we invited them to have a go, and then we invited them to think that they had a chance. I do believe we would have found an extra gear had we conceded the penalty and the game gone to 2-2 but we shouldn’t have dropped one in the first place.

That’s something Ange needs to be working on, or it’s going to cost us.