Can the Celtic Board Survive the AGM, Rule 9 & Winter Transfer Window? // ACSOM // A Celtic State of Mind

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Paul John Dykes (1:09)

Welcome back to the Celtic State of Mind. I'm Paul John Dykes, joined today by Brian Degnan and Alan Morrison. To talk all things Celtic, we've got an hour guys. There's going to be some football because Alan's on the show and it would be a wasted hour without talking football with Alan. And we'll touch on some of the upcoming events in the wider scope of Celtic fandom. Let's start off with the football. Alan, I was looking at your output on the huddle breakdown. Very interesting indeed, speaking our language, but adding it back and up rather with some facts.

And one of the things I wanted to ask you about is how easy we're to play against in terms of attacking us and defending against us, Alan. So I'm going to throw you the bone. Let us know what you found out by analysing Celtic in defence and in attack. And what is it we need to improve on?

Alan Morrison (2:00)

Yeah, listen, there's never one thing, right? And as always, there's a number of things. They tend to be, have a compounding impact. So one weakness tends to amplify another, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That tends to be the way it goes. And as much as some people, small minority might like to blame everything on this player or that player that they don't like or what have you, you know, any weaknesses do tend to be, as I say, amplified. But I mean, let's start with just some basics in terms of, you know, are Celtic, you pose that question, is that actually correct? Just a few, I mean, it's a couple of obvious stats really to back up your assertion.

During the years that you would say Celtic were dominant and you might make a case to say, this is a well-coached, competently, coherently put together side, which would be, you know, under Ange and probably under Rogers in the next two seasons. Across all competitions, this is including Champions League, you know, you're conceding about just under one expected goal per game.

This season, that's gone up to one and a half. So that's a 50 percent increase in the quality of chances that teams are having. The number of shots conceded, so the volume of chances conceded has gone up hugely as well. So and obviously one feeds the other to some extent.

If you look at possession, average Celtic possession against Kilmarnock over the last 10 years, just to take the last opponent would have been 71 percent on the weekend there, it was 58 Let's look at Calvin McGregor. Calvin McGregor is the hold effectively, the deepest lying midfielder in the team. I have a metric called packing, which means you measure how many players have taken out the game with forward passes or dribbles. It also works the other way. So how many times are you taking out the game by the opponents passing through you? So you want your deepest lying defensive midfielder to be the least taken out player as well as the centre backs, because that really would mean you're in big trouble. McGregor averaged around about 10, 11 times in a game when he's bypassed with the ball. This season, that's up about over 25 That's more than doubled.

So not all of this is down to how Celtic is set up. Let me just set that out for a start. As I said to you, there's a number of things going on here. One of the most important things that's going on is the fundamental changes to how the rest of the teams in the league are playing. Now, I know that on many Celtic podcasts they like to just talk about Celtic, but on Huddle Breakdown, we spend a lot of time talking about the opposition, which is, guess what, they have agency in every game that we play and they impact how we play. So there's a massive increase across the league in the last couple of seasons in pressing, counter pressing, in pushing up higher line, less dependency on low compact blocks, more mid blocks, more full court presses, more basketball-y type football. There's some teams who are now playing out from the back, which never used to do. St Mirren, St Johnstone, Motherwell, Harks this season, full court last season, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of teams now playing very differently. They're keeping the ball more, which means Celtic don't have the ball because those teams are keeping it. We even saw that against Kilmarnock. They held the ball for large parts of the game, thus denying Celtic the ball that they used to control a lot. Obviously, there's a lot more man-to-man marking, a lot more high pressing. So they all have an impact. It's not just about Celtic. It's about how other teams play. But there is no doubt that also Celtic are far easier to play through.