Celtic Are Losing The Game Of Inches. But That Can Be Easily Turned Around.

I think the greatest sports movie ever is Any Given Sunday, Oliver Stone’s crazy movie about American football which has so much depth and so much action and energy that watching it is nearly exhausting.

For all that, it’s the only film I’ve ever watched four times in one day and considering its length that’s quite some statement to make.

The movie culminates in a play-off game after a season in which the Miami Sharks have been buffered and battered from one disaster to another. But there’s enough quality in the squad that they’ve gotten to the penultimate stages of the campaign.

The team is badly divided though.

The starting quarterback, Cap Rooney, has found himself the subject of jibes because of his age. The young up and comer, Willie Beamen, who has been the star of the season, doesn’t command any respect in the dressing room. The ageing coach tries to hold it all together, but not long before the divisions were responsible for a colossal defeat in which the squad finally shattered under the weight of the jealousies and bitterness and rivalries and personal animosities which were coursing through the side.

Having told them, that night, he was ashamed to be their coach he now tries to bring them together and the speech that he gives – The Inches Speech as it’s come to be known – is without a doubt the best that has ever been written for a film in the genre.

Its tremendous, it really is and Pacino kills it.

The crux of the speech is that the game is won and lost in tiny little increments. “The margin for error is so small … one half a step too late, or too early, and you don’t quite make it. One half a second too slow or two fast and you don’t quite catch it … the inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second.”

And it’s beautiful because it’s true.

That’s where we were brilliant at the start of this season, in being that inch ahead of the opposition, reacting better in those seconds that decide how games go, and it’s in that inch where we’re not quite doing it just now.

We are out of the Champions League because we’re not winning the game of inches at the moment.

Our passing, our runs off the ball, our movement, our finishing … the trademarks of a great side are all there, all present, and you can see them.

But too often right now, we’re that one half a step too late or too early.

That one half a second too fast or too slow.

Back last season, when Giakoumakis was struggling, I said that I would worry about whether we’d bought a dud on the day he stopped getting into the right positions.

He was doing everything right except putting the ball in the net, and when you are doing everything else the way he was then that will come eventually, and it did.

Aside from some people getting hysterical, almost all the Celtic fans I’ve spoken to and almost all of the sites are keeping a cool head about what we watched on Tuesday night and analysing it in a sensible way.

We can all see that but for some bad finishing we’d be in a much better place than we are … the question is why aren’t we putting the ball in the net with the same regularity we were at the start of the campaign?

I’ve written this week about the mechanics of pressure; it’s important to recognise just how close we are to being a lethal machine.

It is, literally, a matter of inches. It will come.