Once again, it’s the headline that gets me; “Celtic 2-1 Livingston: David Martindale admits Hoops deserved Livi win.”
That was from Sky.
As if there’s a living soul who could have argued the opposite. Martindale usually has an excuse or two. It is telling that last night he had nothing. No diverting, no flannel, no attempts at mitigation.
His team was beaten by the better side. The vastly better side.
But for poor first half finishing, which Ange himself is not best pleased about, it would have been the proverbial cricket score and Martindale knows it and we all bloody well know it.
The lead is nine points again. The goal difference stays 17 in our favour. In spite of the best efforts of the Mibbery, the team has now won its tenth game in a row in the league, the kind of runs which league titles are built on. This is what we do now.
Here are the hard numbers which bear out our superiority.
77% of the possession.
And guess what? That somehow translated into the familiar tale wherein we allegedly committed more fouls; 10 to their 8.
We had 23 shot attempts, to their measly 3.
Our keeper was barely troubled for the whole night, and some think that led to him sleeping on the job when they finally did get up the park and within distance of him. He was suitably pissed off with himself and the defence afterwards, which I think is pretty good actually. No ducking responsibility there.
We had ten shots on target to their two.
There are folk who will sneer that we only managed two goals from that, a 5-1 SOT to goals ratio.
But actually, the ratio was 3-1 because although we didn’t get it I am shamelessly “claiming” Abada’s goal for this analysis as in spite of the pitiful attempts to defend that decision by people kidding on they don’t know the offside rule, there was damn all legitimate reason for them to chop that off.
And we had ten corner kicks to their one, a stat which tells you exactly which ends of the pitch the game was played in. Here’s a clue; not ours.
So yeah, he “admitted” that Celtic deserved to win.
Because seriously, even he doesn’t have the brass ones to try to contend otherwise.
We weren’t at our best, but we were so, so much better than they were on the night.
I thought we were pretty poor James. Slow to get into the box. Crosses going in aimlessly. No threat from corners. Just feel we are over playing it. To many passes which not hurting teams. Hope that was just a bad day at the office. That said its a results driven business and we are clocking up the wins
Having seen the replay the Abada goal was in my opinion (its mine you may have a different one thats fine) correctly called offside. Here is my reason .. The first image (I saw posted on Videocelts .. didnt get a chance to see the match unfortunately as couldnt get a stream to work properly .. one of the drawbacks of living outside of the UK i guess) shows all Livi players in the shot and the player closest to the Livi goal was in fact Abada. When the ball from Turnbull is played towards the goal .. the player closest to the Livi goal is still Abada. In the second phase the Livi defender drops back and this time Abada is level when the Livi defender miscues his clearance allowing Abada to score. However this does not invalidate the fact that in the first initial phase of the attack Abada was closer to the goal than any of the Livi defenders when the ball was played forwards.. therefore in that instance he was offside and before VAR the assistant referee on the line would have flagged as such. Now with VAR they have to allow play to continue until the ball is “dead – out of play” or cleared to the opposite half therefore rendering any possible benefit of the offside position null and void. In this case Abada was initially offside and subsequently benefitted from that position to score. As I say this is MY opinion … Those may differ but from what I know of the rules this is MY interpretation of what happened. At least in this instance unlike the Jota one we can see all of the Livi players in the shot therefore we can determine positionally if a player is closer to the opposition goal than the last defender!!!
Nah, Paul, ARs are taught (even without VAR) to keep flag down until player who is offside either interferes with play (he didn’t) or opponent (at least arguable but I would say he didn’t). The Livi player makes a deliberate play of the ball, although its a crap one. So Abada, although offside, isn’t committing an offside offence.
Think you need to watch it again, Abada is in an offside position and coming back as ball is played forward, before the ball reaches the defender he is in an onside position and moves towards the ball as defender makes a hash of it. goal should stand, you are not offside simply by being in such a position unless seeking to gain advantage or interfering with play, Abada interferes from an onside position. Linesman did not raie his flag. Have a look at Kiogo goal he is well into an offside position as ball is played to Abada who crosses and Kayogo scores. he not only interfered from an offside position, he scored and it stood.
As I have said already we are not playing to our full potential just now, there are players in the side not yet on full throttle, they are off the boil and it is affecting our finishing. Hatate and O’Reilly, our first choice midfielders along with Calum now he is back, are not making the telling passes to the forwards, they are not producing shots on target either from their midfield roles, in fact they seem to be toiling at times, they are lethargic in their movements and the strikers are not getting the through balls they desperately need. Having said that, both Jota and Abada played some decent balls into the box last night and Kyogo , apart from his well taken goal, was mostly always in the wrong place. We need the midfielders to start making better decisions, injecting more pace into their game and firing on sight when they get half a chance. Only when they get their act together will it all start clicking into place again.
The fact that livi players were allowed to encroach everytime we were attempting to play a short corner forcing us to cross the ball into the box , made things easier for livi to defend .
This now happens at every game without any sanction from the MIB
Just another example of MIBs ignoring the laws of the game to disadvantage celtic .
We move the ball forward at snails pace allowing defenders time to get everyone behind the ball, we can eliminate a few then play across which negates the earlier play. We are not forced across but seem to elect to do so looking to play the ball out wide then low cross into areas where defenders go. If we do not attack the front post the the cross is mostly blocked. Last season we were playing balls through the channels where our pace could be used to great effect, not so now. Why have all this pace in the side and not use it?