Scott Brown will have no problem at all if Neil Lennon decides to leave his captain out of his starting eleven tomorrow lunchtime at Fir Park. Brown was substituted on Thursday amid a woeful Celtic performance which clearly was not a one-off situation either in European football or in all games were the team have had just one win in six games.
“Don’t worry about me, I just keep going on,” Broony told the media yesterday, as reported by Glasgow Times. “If the manager needs me, I’m there for him. If he needs to rest me, if he needs to play someone else, then I’m old enough and ugly enough to deal with it.
Both Scott Brown and Callum McGregor looked out on their feet the other night as they were overrun by a young, speedy and confident Sparta Prague side who probably couldn’t believe their luck as the Celtic defence behind the captain were found to be missing in action. Indeed before Brown is dropped Neil Lennon needs to get Duffy and Frimpong out of the defence and hopefully Ajer and Elhamed in. Frimpong should work on his crossing and become a winger because a right back’s first task is to be there to defend!
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“I do whatever’s best for this team. Don’t you worry about myself or me listening to anyone else. I just worry about the team performance, it is not about individuals that you like to come after.
“For us it is all about us sticking together, not listening to the media, not listening to anything else, just worrying about ourselves.”
The terrible run of form needs to change immediately if Celtic are to save their season. The captain has already spoken about his fears that the season is already slipping away, as we reported yesterday.
“It’s not been something that we’ve been used to, but it is what it is,” Broony admitted. “We have to make sure that now we can’t worry about what has happened in the past. We need to kick on now and we need to make sure we look into the future and we start playing as quickly as possible, and we keep clean sheets.
“We work extremely hard, the coaches and everyone puts sessions on for us, and we just don’t seem to be doing it together as a team, so now there are no excuses.
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“We need to start defending as a team – and that goes from the front all the way through to the back,” the Celtic captain stated. “I think for us it’s just about working hard. We have to make sure we do what we did last year, especially the second part of the season we came really good.
“But we can’t rely on the second part of the season coming because who knows what’s going to happen in the future. But now we have a game on Sunday that we have to look forward to.
We have to make sure we have a huge performance,” the Celtic captain said.
“We owe that to the manager. He’s always there fighting for us, taking the heat for us, but now it’s our turn to take the heat for him and we have to come out fighting for him.”
Broony once again mentioned that there is a factor involving the players not all sharing the same changing room due to the Covid restrictions and the protocols that the club have in place at Lennoxtown. “It is always hard to build that bond when you are not in the changing room with the lads but that’s not an excuse.
“The Sparta performance was terrible – and that was from start to finish. That’s on the lads, it’s on nobody else. It is about people sitting in the stand, it is about those that are on the park.”
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