It’s incredible how quickly the tables can turn in football. It was only a few months ago we saw Cluj celebrating like they had won the Champions League at Celtic Park before crashing out before they could reach the group stages.
Now they face a situation where they are desperately scrambling about to try and get any advantage they can against Celtic next week. They only need a point to ensure they qualify for the next round, but they don’t sound confident.
According to a report from The Daily Record, Cluj boss Dan Petrescu is pleading with the Romanian FA to postpone their league game this weekend. You would think that this would only give them a slight advantage going into the game, but Petrescu seems to think it’s make or break.
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Speaking about the possible postponement he said: “It’s very important we postpone this match at the weekend otherwise we have no chance against Celtic .I don’t understand why there are so many games just now. You can see we are very tired.”
If you look at their schedule, they’ve had a few weeks of playing at the weekend and then having a midweek fixture, but so have Celtic so it’s not like his team are going through a ridiculous schedule or anything.
It’s starting to look like he doesn’t have confidence in his side when it comes to getting the result they need against Celtic. That could be due to seeing how much Celtic have improved since the Champions League qualifiers, but he’s certainly getting the excuses in early.
Celtic have already secured their place at the top of the group so their seeding is safe for the next round. It will be interesting to see what Lenny does, he might want to rest as many players as he can for that game but the chance to get some revenge and knock the Romanians out would be incredibly satisfying.
