Ange Postecoglou is expecting a tough game tomorrow up in the Highlands as we face off against Ross County once again. We faced the same foe up in Dingwall way back in August and ran out comfortable winners in the end, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t certain obstacles to overcome on the day that proved tricky.
Although we did win 3-1 courtesy of some lovely football from the team at particular points in the game, County ruffled feathers and caused the Celtic supporters a good amount of angst and frustration as we tried hard to break down their defensively rigid shape that Malky MacKay had them marshalled into ahead of the fixture. It’s the preferred mode of attack from all of those around about us in Scottish football – that is to say, it’s not attack but rather a suffocation of the game.
We looked at points as if we would run out of ideas and time during that one and were all pleasantly deliver when the team stepped up to the plate when required and delivered all three points a an awkward away venue. Last year we had to overcome adversity to to snatch a 2-1 win thanks to a 97th minute Anthony Ralston header, which drove the travelling fans wild with hysteria. It was a game that kept us in the hunt for the Scottish Premiership title and was even sweeter after having saw Carl Starfelt dismissed on the night despite being elbowed in the face.
As Carl Starfelt alluded to in his mainstream media conference yesterday afternoon, he knows only too well the game-plan which County will try and orchestrate, having been on the receiving end of some hefty treatment in the last up at Dingwall. Ange Postecoglou reckons that it will be another tough battle away from home in difficult conditions. He’s banking on the former Celtic defender sticking to his guns with the tactics he has always deployed since he took over the club and knows it will be hard to break down once again for his team.
The Hoops manager said: “It’s always a tough game, we’ve been up there a couple of times already and it’s always a difficult game. Malky sets up his team very well in terms of its structure and there’s a physicality about them, and they are always a threat in set-pieces, so you’ve got to do all those things. At this point in the year, every game has significance as every team is fighting for something, so there’s always going to be a little bite more of an edge and desperation to everything that happens. But it doesn’t change our approach in terms of making sure that we’ve got to perform at the levels we know can. And if we do that then we know we are going to be hard to stop.”
Paul Gillespie
