Brendan Rodgers spoke to Celtic TV after the game in Aberdeen yesterday and was delighted with the outcome at an extremely difficult away ground. It eas a hard-earned 3-1 victory over Barry Robson and his men in the end up, but they certainly gave Rodgers and his new Hoops side a game up at Pittodrie for sure.
The Irishman pointed put the playing surface and Robson’s rapacious man-marking style and system which made life exceedingly ucomfortable for the reigning Scottish Premiership Champions. Never able to remember from off the top of his head an easy fixture against the Dons away from home, he said: “In all my times coming to Aberdeen I can only remember one game that we were comfortable in, but other than that you always have to work really hard for the result.
“The pitch was very long, which made our passing slow, and their style is very committed. They get it forward very quickly and you have to defend lots of first balls and second balls. The players coped with it and it’s great for us to win early on, to come away to one of our rivals and score three goals. When it got to 1-1 we had a bit of adversity and we had to handle that and we did that really well. It’s a really good win for us. Performance-wise we will get better but it’s about getting the results as we build the performance.”
After Aberdeen equalised following Leil Abada’s opener early on in the match, Kyogo Furuhashi managed to take advantage of a Mikey Devlin mistake with a sublime first touch and then rocket finish to put the Bhoys back ahead not long afterwards.
Rodgers explained that he and his backroom staff are trying to add more dimensions to the Japan international’s game and want him to become more involved in the play. He said: “What we’ve tried to do is add variety to Kyogo’s game and you can see in the last game he’s very good in going behind.
“We’ve tried to include him more in the build-up phase which opens spaces, especially when teams are man-marking. His finish was sublime. He’s clever and cute in the game, he’s an elite player in terms of his movements and his runs and he played the offside really well and that’s what you tell your strikers, not to rush back. It was a good time for us to score as well, especially after they had equalised.”
The boss was especially pleased with the impact his new bhoys had coming off of the bench yesterday too, with Odin Thiago Holm and Yang Hyun-jun contributing towards the end of the game – eventually sealing that knockout blow to make it 3-1.
On both men, he added: “Odin does really well to keep the ball in and recycles it. Yang does great, goes on to that side and beats his man, and Matt now has two out of two. It’s just about arriving into the area and that was the goal that killed the game. It’s always difficult at 2-1, a lot of pressure on to your back-line with direct balls, and that kills the game and allows us to close the game out.”
Paul Gillespie
Meanwhile, check out Matt Corr speaking to the one and only Martin O’Neill on The Celtic Star Podcast…
