Celtic in Europe Again

Celtic lost their structure once the game became stretched, and that is usually when the trouble starts. LASK kept attacking the space out wide and Celtic never looked fully organised enough to deal with the second phase balls.
 
The issue was obvious from the moment Celtic stopped winning the loose balls in midfield because then every attack from LASK came back at them too quickly and the back line just kept dropping deeper and deeper
 
There is some credit to LASK here because they kept believing and kept forcing the issue. But Celtic have to take a hard look at how a game gets away from them so fast, especially when they had the cushion to manage it.
 
The key moment is not just the goal itself but the lack of pressure on the delivery. If you let teams keep putting balls into the box uncontested, eventually you get punished, and Celtic found that out the hard way.
 
honestly i was watching this and just kept laughing then getting annoyed then laughing again because it felt like celtic were begging for it the whole time and the fourth goal was just the final slap in the face
 
At 4-0 a game should be dead, and that is why this is going to sting so much for Celtic. They had the result in their hands, they had the margin, and they still let LASK turn it into a complete mess. You can talk about momentum and pressure all you want, but when two wide open headers are left there at the end, that is not bad luck, that is a breakdown in concentration and organisation. Celtic fans will be furious because this is exactly the type of night that gets bundled into the same old European jokes, and fair enough, because how many times can you watch the same film before you start blaming the script and the actors and the director all at once, absolute shambles from top to bottom and I am not even a Celtic fan
 
I was in the pub when the scoreline started getting weird and everyone around me who had no interest in either side suddenly started watching the screen like it was the main event of the night, and by the time the fourth went in the whole place was laughing and shaking their heads because it just had that feeling of a team completely losing the plot in real time, you could hear the groans every time LASK got near the box and then once the final one went in it was just that awkward mix of people laughing because it is ridiculous and people feeling sorry for the fans because you know that pain is real and it is going to travel home with them
 
I know everyone is going to pile on Celtic now but there is still a way to look at this without turning it into pure mockery. They were in control for long enough to show they had something about them, and even when it went wrong they were still trying to play rather than just sit there and surrender completely. LASK deserve huge credit for forcing the issue and making the night swing the way it did, but Celtic are not some joke side for being dragged into a horrible ending like this, it happens to plenty of clubs and it is easy to laugh when it is not yours. They will hate the result but the response matters now and calling them finished after one collapse is lazy
 
The basic point is that Celtic should have managed the game much better once they had that cushion, because European ties punish poor control more than domestic matches do. What gets me though is how quickly the conversation always turns into a meme after a result like this, as if the whole club exists just to provide jokes for the rest of the internet, and maybe that is part of the problem because the pressure clearly piles up on them every time things wobble and then the crowd and the players seem to feed off the panic instead of calming it down
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top