CAMERON TO PUT THE SQUEEZE ON BENZEMA
REFLECTING on his Kilmarnock team’s recent 5-0 defeat to Celtic at Rugby Park, Mail on Sunday columnist Derek McInnes admits he was struck by the intensity maintained by the champions late in the game. ‘Celtic don’t let you breathe, they force you to defend,’ says McInnes. ‘I watched Cameron Carter-Vickers persistently bringing that back lot up the pitch — even in the 90th minute, he was still screaming at them to squeeze.’
The observation is put to CarterVickers during a call arranged to preview Tuesday’s Champions League opener against Real Madrid.
‘That’s a tactic we use against every opponent,’ says the defender. ‘Obviously it’s led by the manager, who wants us to get up the pitch as quickly as possible and squeeze the space.
‘It keeps the danger away when you play so high up the pitch.’
It’s one thing to do that against a newly promoted Kilmarnock side, quite another to expect a similar level of control against the reigning European champions.
Yet Ange Postecoglou has been consistently bullish — his team won’t change their approach, he maintains, even against the best club team in the world.
A £6million summer signing after a successful year on loan from
Tottenham Hotspur, Carter-Vickers is happy to endorse and carry out his manager’s orders.
‘We will go out there and try to play the way we always do,’ says the defender. ‘I don’t think there’s much point in trying to change because we are not used to playing a different way.
‘If we suddenly changed, we wouldn’t play as well. So we need to try to impose our style on the game and go from there.
‘Of course there’s risk. To use that squeezing of the pitch as an example, we need to be wary of the fact Real have such good players.
‘So there has to be a balance. You need to push up at the right times but also drop when required.
‘But if we can be brave and do that then it will definitely benefit us.’
Elsewhere on these pages, former Real midfielder Steve McManaman offers a view that Celtic’s highenergy front-foot football is indeed capable of unsettling the Madristas in Glasgow this midweek.
Carter-Vickers will be in direct opposition to Karim Benzema, by common view the form player on the planet over the past 12 months.
The 24-year-old can’t wait. He continues: ‘I’m excited to be going up against someone like him. You want to play against the very best and he’s at the very top of the game.
‘I haven’t started watching footage too much yet but I have seen him a lot down the years. I have a pretty good idea of what he is good at — which is a lot of things!
‘Even before I started playing professionally, I watched him playing for Madrid in the Champions League and winning it.
‘He has been doing it for so long which tells you the level. It shows not only how good he is but how consistent he is too.’
Now 34, Benzema is perhaps not as quick as he once was, while in midfield he is backed up by the playmaking talent of Luka Modric, himself a recipient of the world player of the year award in 2018.
Modric gave four years of service to Spurs before moving to Spain in 2012, when Carter-Vickers remained a schoolgoer.
‘I was too young to train with Modric, he was gone by the time I got to Spurs, but obviously I knew all about him,’ he explains. ‘But go through that Madrid team and every one of them plays at a high level.
‘For the majority of us, this will be our first experience of the Champions League and these are the games we all want to play in.
‘I am excited for it but it’s important for us not just to be in — but to compete.’
To do that, Celtic will need to be significantly better than they were in last season’s European campaign. If it was perhaps a stretch to expect them to beat Bayer Leverkusen or Real Betis, Carter-Vickers accepts that there was a naïveté to some of the team’s group stage displays.
Yet he also offers some context that he believes provides grounds for optimism ahead of a step up to the top table.
‘We probably need to be a little bit cleverer in our defending, our press and our team shape,’ he says. ‘But look at the two Leverkusen games as examples. This sounds silly but although we lost 4-0 in the home game, I thought we did all right.
‘Their goalkeeper made a few saves — it could have been tighter.
‘The away game was much closer. Okay, we lost 3-2 but we went 2-1 up that night which shows that we are able to adapt and improve on our performances at European level.’