How The Scotsman Tried To Pour Cold Water On Celtic’s Red Hot Display Yesterday.
Soccer Football - Scottish Premiership - Celtic v Ross County - Celtic Park, Glasgow, Scotland, Britain - March 19, 2022 Celtic's Georgios Giakoumakis celebrates scoring their fourth goal to complete his hat-trick REUTERS/Russell Cheyne
This is going to be a vintage day for writing about the media.
My inbox has a bunch of stories from around the press in Scotland in it, and I’m going to get to them one at a time.
Right now I want to marvel at the dismal effort from The Scotsman last night which suggested that Ange hadn’t been particularly pleased at the performance of the team.
Matthew Elder claimed that the manager delivered a “mixed review” after a “mixed performance.” As far as I could make out, from the manager, and from what I watched myself, that idea exists only in Elder’s head and that of his editor.
Because we were completely dominant yesterday aside for a few mistakes, which Ange put down to “blowing off the cobwebs” of pre-season training.
He was very pleased with how we played and although he pointed out there is room for improvement – and he always does that – he was also at great pains to say that the good bits of the performance were “really good” which as close to being effusive as he’s going to get this early.
I get that some folk who have watched us are concerned by what they see, but by that I don’t mean Celtic fans.
We chose a deliberately difficult pre-season schedule because we wanted to be tested, we wanted to face the coming campaign knowing we’d taken on some good teams and as far as the manager is concerned, we’re well on course.
Watching us at times against Rapid, but more especially yesterday, you could see that the pieces are all starting to fall into place, even this early, even with more than a fortnight of games and preparation still to go.
We are on course to start this season way better focussed and ready than we did the last one. There will be no three wins from the first seven, with three losses to balance them out, this time.
We’re going to hit the ground running.
No wonder some in the media are desperate to cast doubt on that.
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Celtic’s summer started disastrously when Eddie Howe turned the club down. On which date did he make that fateful decision?
