Cameron Carter-Vickers looked back on Celtic’s desperately poor performance on Saturday against Hearts at Celtic Park as the Hoops suffered a second successive Scottish Premiership defeat to effectively wipe out the lead at the top of the table. Celtic remain five points clear but have now played two matches more than theRangers in second place.
Yesterday theRangers continued their recent momentum by winning the League Cup for the first time in their history as theRangers supporter Andrew Dallas watching on VAR proved beyond reasonable doubt that not every shirt pulling incident in the penalty area is a spot kick and that wasn’t even his most controversial call.
Yesterday’s result means that since being founded by Charles Green in the summer of 2012, theRangers have now completed the set of winning the three domestic honours. Their eyes are on a treble all in one season now and it’s fair to say that there is a real title race on.
Over the weekend there was anger, under stably so when you do what John Kennedy was talking about on Friday afternoon when he said that they only look at the performance and not the result. Well on Saturday John, the performance was worse than the result.
Kennedy’s mantra was of course straight out of the Ange Postecoglou playbook. It might be worth remembering something else Ange always said – that he always picked the best side that he thought had the best chance of winning the game.
That has NOT been happening at Celtic this month as the manager, perhaps encouraged by his employers, has been playing as many players as possible with the January sales in mind. That policy has to end now, it has contributed to us dropping six unnecessary points and if the title does end up at Ibrox we’ll look back on the pre-Christmas horror shows with both immense frustration and also disgust.
“You’ve got to try and take the emotion out of it as much as you can. Look at the football, analyse the game and try to improve, that’s all you can really do,” Cameron Carter-Vickers told the media, as reported by Scottish Sun, after the 2-0 defeat to Hearts on Saturday afternoon.
“The emotion is understandable. When you lose a game that’s how we feel as players and that’s how the fans feel as well. But there is no point looking at a game in an emotional state. You’ve got to look at it clear-headed, stay as calm as you can and try to improve,” CCV added.
The American international defender continued: “We just have to analyse what went wrong, see where we can improve as a team and as individuals. If we do that, performances will get better.
“Emotions are obviously high when you lose a game. But as a group, we’ve got to get our heads down, work hard on the training pitch and try to turn out better performances. With better performances come wins.
“We weren’t good enough. We conceded two sloppy goals, which is something we need to look at in training and try to improve on. We probably should have created more and also finished the chances we did have to try to get ourselves back in the game.
“For large parts of the second half, we did have Hearts in their half and around their box, but when we did get in, we weren’t good enough in the final third to create clear openings to score.
“There are a few boys in there who feel the way I do. It’s no use having just CalMac. He’s our captain and shows responsibility, but he needs help. A few of us are willing to take that responsibility, try to lead the team, and that’s something we need to do in the coming weeks.”
Celtic play Livingston on Saturday where the lead could be down to just two points with theRangers playing St Johnstone at Ibrox on Wednesday night, using up one of their games in hand.
David Martindale will be parking the bus and hoping for the gifts that came Hearts and Kilmarnock’s way in recent games. There is no room for further mishap from this Celtic team and the support needs to get back to backing the team for the entire 90 minutes as we look to secure the points, with theRangers at Motherwell on Sunday.
