I WANT SQUAD SORTED EARLY
Celtic boss is closing in on a £2million deal for the highly-rated left-back who has 18 months left on his contract in Sweden.
Postecoglou can tie up a spectacular first season in Scottish football tonight by taking at least a point from Tannadice and clinching the Premiership crown after overseeing a massive squad rebuild.
And he hopes a further raft of new arrivals will be rushed into the club’s Lennoxtown HQ in time for the start of his pre-season preparations and a crack at European football’s premier event.
Asked yesterday if he wants the next recruitment phase of his revolution to be in place ahead of the coming campaign, Postecoglou nodded and said: “Yeah, most definitely.
“The work has already started, we’re already planning and I’ve already had conversations with the club about the kind of players we want to identify and bring into the club.
“Our priority is to try to get that done early so come pre-season, with us hopefully winning the Premiership and getting straight into the group stage, we know we’ve got a really good opportunity in pre-season to work with the players without the pressure of competition.
“It would be great if we could have all the new players in by that time.
“Sometimes these things are taken out of your hands a little bit but our intent is to try to get our business done early.
“We’ve already identified the areas we need to improve, so we’ve already started work on that.”
And Postecoglou, who’ll be without injured Croat
Josip Juranovic tonight on Tayside, admits the plans should be made less complicated by avoiding the early Euro qualifying rounds. He said: “There’s so much uncertainty around it, even in terms of your recruitment, you don’t know if you’re recruiting for the Champions League or not.
“You don’t know that until you go through the qualifiers, so there’s all these sort of unknowns and usually at that time of year you have players coming in at all different times.
“You’re not really primed to perform, so it’s a challenging period.
“Not having that allows you to map out a preseason of certainty in terms of friendly games and the kind of work we want to do with the players without worrying we need to be at a good competitive level too early.”
Celtic, though, have now gone 18 years without winning a knockout round in European competition. Postecoglou is determined to make up for lost time.
He added: “We want the club to be at that level on a consistent basis, that’s our overall goal. It’s going to be exciting, it’s going to be very challenging. But what an opportunity for us as a club to expose our players and our team against the very best in Europe.”