“Before I get lynched for been a Shane Duffy fan I would like to point out a couple of things not in his defence, but using him as the best example of many things we are seeing that are not right
First of all I have watched Shane Duffy many times for lreland before he came to us, and as a defender he is only really a penalty box defender, or to win high long balls so he is fairly limited in ability for what the modern Centre Back and Celtic are looking for. Christopher Jullien and Kris Ajer have been slaughtered for not being physically strong enough especially against Kilmarnock.
I listened to Gordon Strachan at half time on Sunday blaming Duffy for not tracking the player into an area where I would say midfielders or full backs should be covering, so any form of ball into a wide area is always going to have Duffy in trouble with his lack of pace.
“So on Sunday when he tracked the player it left the hole where Olivier Ntcham was to busy ball watching or too lazy to track a run, resulting in a penalty.
Also we saw Duffy, one minute sending one of the sheep into the stand on the left side, then getting caught out on the right side. I don’t and won’t feel comfortable seeing Shane Duffy in these positions.
We like to see our centre-backs to recycle the ball to put us back on the front foot, Duffy is used to the safety first approach but like many tries to be to clever for his own good.
This playing out from the back will only work if the midfield start showing for the easy ball to give him the easy out ball which hasn’t been on against teams who close down that space.
Our closing down of the ball is brutal at the moment and our tracking of runners from midfield even worse.
Teams will play upon weaknesses within our defence and we haven’t seen much from management or coaching to address obvious problems. Is it no wonder with such a lack of instructions or are our defence playing to these instructions as I am getting a sence of make it up as we go along and hope something will come right.
John nó
