Celtic’s Left Back Dilemma Shows Where The Transfer Strategy Is Most Faulty.

Looking at Celtic’s squad at the moment – and I appreciate that we have hours of this window still to go – there is a feeling that we’re going to miss out on more than one area where we badly need reinforcements. I said if we got the midfielder and the striker I’d be fairly satisfied; the midfielder looks like it’s done, the striker might not happen.

But almost everyone else in Celtic cyberspace has mentioned two positions above all; the left back and the goalkeeper.

I think most folks are pretty well pleased with the way Alastair Johnston plays, so we’ve got no pressing need there although if he gets injured few fans want to be relying on Tony Ralston, but nobody is panicking as long as AJ is fit.

At left back, Greg Taylor is just off the best season of his career. I was on the Spiers podcast this morning talking about the game on Sunday, and used, as I have here, my custom computer analogy.

Ange constructed his team very specifically. Every player performed a specific function, and those functions no longer apply. This team is not doing what it was built to do, and so obviously there are going to be players who simply no longer fit.

Taylor performed well because Ange custom made him for a specific job.

Now that job is no longer part of the tactical plan, Taylor’s weaknesses – which Ange’s system was able to make less relevant and obvious – are all coming back to the fore.

I feel pretty sorry for Taylor in that respect. He’s a decent footballer and an outstanding pro. But as I said yesterday in the piece about our youth players, professional sport – and football in particular – is a harsh, unforgiving meritocracy.

It is not enough to praise him for what he did last season, or to have a certain amount of sympathy for his plight; we cannot hang onto someone just because he’s a decent kid. Eventually the good of the unit comes first.

The thing is, I would take Taylor in the team all day, every day, next to his understudy and even writing that word is part of the problem, because Bernabei cost us twice what Taylor did without any of the positives. Off the field, he lacks discipline.

On the field he lacks … everything from what I can see. He’s James Tavernier for the left side of the pitch. Except without the goals.

I saw nothing that indicated that he was suited to Ange’s style. I see no sign that he is in any way suited to Rodgers’ team. It makes me wonder why we signed him at all, and that brings us back to the transfer policy and this debate over whose needs it actually serves.

Let’s be honest, Bernabei did not fit the Ange team, and the manager never looked convinced that he would. Whilst I am sure he told the board we needed a left-back and asked for the options, this is what they presented him with.

But I cannot believe that he knew any more about the player than we did.

He certainly didn’t watch him.

Who amongst our scouting team did?

I would be amazed if anyone from Celtic had actually gone to Argentina and seen Bernabei in the flesh, and especially more than once. So, did we trust the verdicts of other people … or was this an analytics led decision?

I know a lot of the decisions that our club makes in the transfer market are … and it can work, and it has worked, and very well … but there are things which aren’t in the numbers.

There are stylistic differences between playing in South America and Europe, and that’s part of it of course, but it’s more than that. I mentioned Tavernier for a reason; for all the headlines he gets, for all the goals he scores and assists he provides, he is an awful defensive player and when that’s your main job on the pitch you need to be a lot better at it than he is.

Likewise, a Celtic left back’s primary function is to defend and because there are different sets of numbers I have a theory that perhaps our analysis is weighted towards the wrong set of them.

Whenever I read that a player is “an attacking full-back” I wonder if he can actually do the basic stuff. That Bernabei can also play left wing made me instantly suspicious that we’d signed him based on the wrong set of numbers, or rather in an analysis weighted more heavily towards his attacking capabilities than his defensive ones.

Like I said, there is a good reason to bring Tavernier, and even Barisic, into this debate; neither of those guys can defend worth a damn. Why, then, has Ibrox not shipped them out ages ago?

It’s because they both get up the pitch and set up goals. During their game on Wednesday night one commentator praised the start Barisic has made to the season because he has four assists; that’s not the criteria I’d be judging him on.

I know that our club has a “style” and that nearly every manager in our living memory has wanted to use our full-backs as attacking weapons, but I wonder if our analysis – and not just ours – is slanted more towards that than on more obvious defensive metrics. You look at the types of full-backs we’ve signed in recent years and I think that question bears answering.

I wouldn’t have Barisic or Tavernier near this Celtic team.

But in point of fact, we’re just as guilty of this as they are because when we talk about Taylor having a tremendous season in the last campaign, we’re not simply talking about his defending but his utility as an attacker as well.

But what is clear, what is absolutely obvious, is that Taylor is a much, much better defensive player than Bernabei is, which is why I reckon Brendan has already made his mind up as far as the Argentine is concerned. Signed for big money, he clearly did not possess one iota of what Ange expected him to, and he saw immediately that this was the case.

Rodgers has even less reason to like him; look at the two full backs we were linked with when he was here last time, both of whom ended up at Leicester; Timothy Castagne and James Justin. Both are great at getting up the pitch, but first and foremost both of them can defend. Both of them are tough tackling warriors and that’s why he wanted them at Celtic and why he went and got them when he moved there. Those guys are textbook Rodgers players.

This isn’t just limited to our full-backs.

We’ve signed strikers based on nothing more than analytics and number crunching; Patryk Klimala is a case in point. He had certain attributes and based on those he was recommended as a signing.

When he left – and we made our money back on him, which shows that the analysis itself wasn’t faulty – John Kennedy made the staggering admission that he wasn’t suited to our style of play … which made me wonder what in God’s name he was ever signed for in the first place, as that should have been obvious.

But it was only really obvious once he was signed, so whilst the analysis wasn’t dreadful what was absolutely off point was the link between that analysis and the needs of the manager and the team. Klimala was brought to this club on the recommendation of the scouting department apparently without them ever once asking the manager if he fitted the system.

Bernabei doesn’t fit the system. He appears to be a sub-par defensive player who was incapable of adjusting to either to Ange’s style or Brendan’s, and I can only assume that whatever metric we were basing his signing on either covered a multitude of sins or we were looking more at the attacking numbers than the defensive ones, as though that was an afterthought.

And maybe there’s a lesson in that.

In the window where we’ve gotten Barkas and Ajeti off the wage bill and written off multi-million-pound transfer fees for those guys it pains me to think that we might have another drag on wages stinking the place out right now … and having arrived here for a good few quid it is surely not out of order to ask who suggested him and on what basis?

If that’s a mistake (which it clearly is) we need to learn from it.

The latest podcast from Graham Spiers can be heard here.