Sandman’s Definitive Ratings – Celtic v Tangerine Dream

Q: It says a lot for your players’ mentality that they’ve come through another week of turmoil with the change and produce a performance like that?

Martin O’Neill: “There’ll be plenty more turmoil between now and then at the end of the season! It’s nice. We’ve got a big game on Wednesday, so the lads are off tomorrow, ready for Monday now. Don’t get carried away, I thought we played really well. Somebody told me we had, like, 32 passes in the build-up to the first goal. But we still have to score it, you know? And while we had things that were flying across the box and we had a bit of pressure, you know, you still have to break them down. And so Yang, who’s having a really good time of it at the minute, it was nice to score. Great.”

Q: Do you think Yang, I mean, you did a bit of work with him the first time? I see comparisons with what you did with Bobby Petta. When you first got him, you transformed the confidence first and gave him that belief?

Martin O’Neill: “It’s the way that he can go past players, which is great. That’s a big, big asset in today’s game. Big, big asset. So he can go past them. Sometimes I think he might actually even be better on the left-hand side, checking in and coming in, because he can hit, and he can get clear of players when he’s coming in. But Sebastian Tounekti did well today, you know, on the other side. And Yang, having played on the right-hand side for the last couple of games, that was fine, just to keep it at that.”

Q: How much of a confidence boost can that result, the clean sheet, give them for the remainder of the campaign?

Martin O’Neill: “Well, naturally here, I would have taken a victory in any way, but the lads know that anyway, so you kind of get bored listening to it. But I would have taken it. But the way we performed today should give them extra confidence anyway.

Continues on the next page…