Celts won’t roll over when the pressure is on, insists Brown
It’s natural to say you shrink but it wasn’t like that at all against Dons
WHATEVER Scott Brown lacks as a football er, his commitment is rarely queried. The idea of Celtic’s captain — or anyone else — keeping something back as Ronny Deila flounders is a hard one to swallow.
Yet rumours persist that the Parkhead dressing room is less than enamoured by Deila’s regime and its methods. They began after changes to the training-ground menu and intensified after a reshuffling of the medical department.
Defeats to Ross County and Aberdeen served only to add fuel to the fire. To the inevitable claims that Deila has ‘lost’ the Celtic dressing room and that some are not giving as much as they might.
Adamant the players remain behind their manager, however, Brown insisted: ‘No matter who the manager is, whoever is the manager at the time, the players give 110 per cent.
‘We worked just as hard (during Wednesday’s 2-1 defeat at Pittodrie) but we didn’t create as many chances as we should have.
‘We know that and we’ve taken that on the chin. We need to go and work on that now. We need to develop and see what we can do in the next few games because it’s going to be a hard few games.’
East Kilbride in the Scottish Cup is unlikely to put another theory to the test. Namely that Celtic shrink and shrivel in adversity.
The Parkhead club have been renowned for improbable fightbacks down the years. The current team are quite a contrast. They started well against Ross County and Aberdeen, went behind, and never threatened to retrieve the situation.
Accusations of frailty and weakness, both physically and mentally, continue to dog Deila’s team. After the League Cup semi-final defeat to County, even the manager made those same accusations himelf.
‘That’s just an easy thing to say,’ countered Brown. ‘It’s a natural thing to say, that you shrink, you go down. But it wasn’t like that.
‘If you watch the Aberdeen game, we continued to do what we were doing in the first 30 minutes.
‘Then they got a corner and put a great ball in the box, they got a header and it’s muddled in and somehow got in as well. But we’ve come out in the second half and brought on the big man (Colin Kazim- Richards) and he’s a powerhouse. He was holding the ball up and causing all sorts of problems. We changed the formation and put two up front.
‘We kept them in, we camped them in the whole second half and we had a lot of possession, but we’ve not really done too much with it.’
Close to Charlie Mulgrew off the pitch, Brown identifies the loss of his friend as a factor in recent defeats.
Various attempts to come back from injury have ended in breakdowns for Mulgrew. His experience of the rough and the smooth of life at Celtic has been missed.
‘I think we still have players there and we have players coming back who have that,’ said Brown.
‘Charlie Mulgrew has been a big miss for us for a big part of the season and he’s definitely got that.
‘He loves the club, he fights, he wants to win and that’s what we need to show a lot more of.’
A holding midfielder l atterly, Scotland international Mulgrew might also have filled a hole in central defence at times.
The leaking of bad goals from set-pieces has become a damaging habit, the latest being Aberdeen’s second on Wednesday.
‘To go 2-0 down to a good team like Aberdeen, which they are, everyone knows they are, is always going to be hard,’ acknowledged Brown.
‘We lost three goals at the weekend to Ross County as well. We can’t keep losing so many goals.’
Brown sees no need to stand up and deliver home truths to underperforming team-mates. The demands and expectations of Celtic are hardly a secret. Players are hardly short of reminders when performances fall short of the accepted standard.
‘They know how it is,’ he said. ‘They get the abuse from Twitter and stuff, they know how the fans feel.
‘They just need the fans to stick with us. They know we will show that we will win the league at the end of the season and that the manager is the right man for the job.
‘It is always hard for the new players coming i n to establish themselves in the team. We had a good six-month period there, then the two new guys have just come in and have done well in training.
‘We’ve got guys like Scott Allan, Ryan Christie and now Colin KazimRichards. We need to put trust in
them, whether it is 15 or 20 minutes off the bench or for 90 minutes.’
Brown believes that Celtic can still have a decent campaign. ‘Winning a Double always makes it a good season,’ he declared.
Patrick Roberts scored one and set up three for Celtic’s development t e am against Motherwell at Cappielow yesterday and could bring verve and freshness against East Kilbride in Airdrie tomorrow.
And Brown feels that he himself has plenty to give after recovering from a knee injury sustained in December.
‘I’m getting there slowly with my own fitness and 90 minutes was hard on Wednesday night,’ he admitted.
‘I started to feel my legs cramping i n the l ast 10 minutes but I’m getting back to normal and I feel good. I’ll be OK to play on the artificial pitch at Airdrie.
‘ I’m l ooking forward to being involved on Sunday and to getting some more minutes under my belt.
‘It’s all about getting fitness now, trying to get the sharpness back. The constant r unning i sn’t a problem, it’s the short, sharp stuff. So to play a couple of games back-to-back is good.
‘There are still two or three months to go, so I can get a good number of games under my belt for Celtic and a couple of games coming up with Scotland as well.’