It's no exaggeration to suggest Ange Postecoglou did not like what he saw in Leipzig last week. It wasn’t so much the result which ground the Big Aussie’s gears so badly, even though the 3-1 defeat against Red Bull clipped Celtic’s Champions League wings.
As far as he’s concerned, accidents like this will happen from time to time when he takes ‘his football’ and rolls it out onto the most dangerous stage in Europe. No, it was the sight of his players retreating into their shells and resorting to a low risk, safety-first strategy which turned a bad night into an intolerable one for a manager who refuses to take a single backwards step.
That’s why he staged ‘an intervention’ at Lennoxtown last week, to remind his men of what Ange-ball is meant to be all about. And it’s why he’s prepared to cop the blame on their behalf tonight, if any further Group F points should be taken back to Germany by the same Bundesliga big guns.
“It’s not easy. Again, it’s human nature, particularly with the group of players we have. They’re still experiencing something new,” Postecoglou said yesterday when asked how he plans on coaxing the bravery back out of them.
“It’s by trying to show them that they have protection if things go wrong. I’ll take the responsibility for it. Don’t fear.
“It’s only human nature that, playing away from home in a Champions League game and you’ve equalised, you feel like you are really in the game. You’ll tighten up a little bit and think, ‘Jeez, a point in Leipzig would be brilliant! We don’t want to give away this point Instead of passing forward, maybe I’ll just hit the safe pass. Instead of making a run forward, maybe I’ll just sit here in case we lose the ball.’
“So, that’s all part of the process. It’s just human nature. It’s about trying to show the players and get them to understand that’s not the way we’ve set up to play, it’s not going to help us in our endeavour to be successful. And if it does go wrong in doing what I want them to do then I’ll take responsibility.”
It does sound like an attempt at reprogramming the human brain. But Postecoglou disagrees.
He went on: “It’s not re-programming. If you want to improve, if you want to get better, you’ve got to get out of that sort of insecurity you have about anything and be bold in your approach. That’s my view, anyway.
“Others will have a different view. But that’s kind of my view why we play our kind of football. It’s why we take the approach we do.
“It’s why I sign the players I have and put the team together the way I have because it’s designed to play this kind of football.
“If I had a different approach and we were set up a bit more defensively structured, I’d have different players in there and we’d play a different way. So, it doesn’t suit us anyway.”
And tonight - roared on by a fever pitch Celtic Park crowd - Postecoglou is convinced his players will not be guilty of making the same mistakes. He nodded: “Absolutely that’s the case.
“Even in the first game against Real, I think if Callum’s strike goes in instead of hitting the post, I don’t think you would’ve seen us going into our shell – even at 1-0 up against Real.
“With the crowd behind them and being at home, that would’ve encouraged you. But, again, we’ve got to experience all these things.
“This is the first time we’ve been away from home. We got ourselves back into the game.
“It was kind of the opposite against Shakhtar, we really went for it at the end and we should’ve got a winner. But we were going for it, we weren’t settling for a point.
“But again it’s another level up. So for me it’s just part of the journey we’re on, part of the process we’ve got to go through.”
He certainly makes a compelling argument even if the evidence is starting to pile up against it.
The hard fact of the matter is that failure to claim a first group win tonight will leave Postecoglou and Celtic anchored to the bottom of the group after four games with little or no chance of making the knock-out stages
And yet Postecoglou is not looking at this through a short term lense. He said: “If it was easily fixable, you’d see a lot more teams winning the Champions League but you don’t.
“There’s a reason why a select few do and a select few get through to the latter stages. But you’ve got to aspire to get there. And this is the best way forward for us.
“We’ve got to chip away at it. You can sit here and just say they are always going to be ahead of us, all these big clubs, and we are never going to bridge the difference. All we can maybe aim for is taking a scalp or two along the way.
“Or you can try to chip away at it. And my view is we chip away at it by taking the game to them every time you play them and hopefully you edge closer every time you are out there.
“We are going to have to be very, very good tomorrow night.
“But the only way we can inch towards a club like that and some of the other clubs like that is by taking the approach we have.”
There will, then, be no tactical tweak designed to make Celtic more defensively robust and better able to cope with what is effectively a Leipzig front four. That’s simply not his style.
Postecoglou said: “I don’t think it’s about tweaking what we do. Every time we play it doesn’t matter who the opposition are, they’ve always got strengths.
“We look at the way we play and how we can negate those strengths.
“As we showed last week if we give them opportunities by giving the ball away or playing in our half for too long, they will hurt us. You’ve got to be aware defensively in transition in particular.
“If they win the ball they are going to go 100 miles per hour towards your goal so we have to be set-up to stop that.
“But the flip side of that is we will have some opportunities going the other way if we play football in their half.
“We have a similar type of set-up in terms of our front line where we are going to hurt them too.”
READ NEXT
