Well, Well, Well

So well, well, well, glory be to Motherwell! They got us out of a very deep hole of our own digging, and the differential remains the same. But, having thanked and praised Motherwell, let us examine what was really an awful performance by Celtic (and Hibs, who were no better) at Easter Road today.

I would not have believed that this was a Celtic team. Apart from the fact they were playing in black thanks to this absurd belief that Celtic and Hibs is a colour clash, there was very little that was Celtic like in that performance. Only Juranovic, McGregor and Jota looked anything like what we need as tempo, urgency and even effort seemed to be lacking until the damage was done and it was far too late. We cannot win the League if we serve up anodyne, insipid, flaccid rubbish like that! And please don’t anyone insult anyone’s intelligence by talking about a “European hangover”!

The defence can escape some criticism because they did not lose a goal – but mistakes were made that a better team would have punished, and Joe Hart’s ludicrous corner kick in the second half well deserves a place in Football’s Craziest Moments on You Tube. In midfield, Rogic was out of sorts (again) and what on earth has gone wrong with Hatate? For large stretches of the game, I forgot he was playing and that is one of the biggest insults you can give a football player.

Up front, it was so obvious that we had no aerial presence. So why did we fire so many balls across the penalty box in the air? Now and again, I felt that we had hard luck e.g. that lovely cross ball from Jota to Abada in the first half deserved a goal but Liel was just a little wide. But we did not create enough chances, and the game became, frankly, a bore with little in the way of any kind of football being played. And we cannot say that we were up against a class team. Hibs were awful as well.

A game to forget, but it was actually a good day in the sense that we are still three points ahead and now only 10 games remain. This must not blind us to the fact that we cannot win the League unless we improve our performance to a considerable extent. We now have a St Mirren team at Parkhead on Wednesday. They are no mugs and will be out to impress their new Manager. And then we have out bogey team, Livingston next Sunday. So hold tight, bhoys and ghirls, this is going to be rough.

David Potter