Three wins in 13 European games is not a good look for Ange. He must start to show he has the answers against Shakhtar
THE facts and figures trotted out in the post-mortem into Celtic’s first, failed, excursion in the Champions League for five years have been as blinding as the Parkhead disco lights.
In four Group F encounters, they have had 54 attempts at goal and 16 on target. Even though those forward advances have troubled the net just twice, there is enough with which to build the case that manager Ange Postecoglou is correct in stating his team is worthy of competing at that level.
In the midst of all this, though, one unavoidable statistic has barely merited a mention. Postecoglou has now lost nine of his last 13 games in European competition, managing one draw away to Shakhtar Donetsk in Poland last month and winning three other fixtures — home and away against the no-marks of Ferencvaros and a dead rubber in Glasgow with Real Betis.
It’s why, even though Europe looks a foregone conclusion for another season, the return with Shakhtar on home turf a week on Tuesday still carries a certain significance.
Over and above keeping faint hopes of escaping into the Europa League alive, Postecoglou needs to show he can win meaningful games against capable opposition in this arena and be someone truly capable of restoring the club’s trashed reputation there.
The Aussie (below) was responsible for many remarkable achievements in his debut season. One of which was taking Celtic out of three separate European tournaments in the same campaign.
It was hard to be harsh on him, though. He’d walked into a basket case of a club that had decided, despite running a ludicrous wage bill, that Europe came a distant second to domestic bragging rights and then imploded spectacularly as hopes of ‘The Ten’ were sunk faster than a few pandemic pints by the pool in Dubai.
That he somehow managed to win the Scottish Premiership rendered defeat by a poor Midtjylland, a 5-1 aggregate hosing from Bodo/Glimt and the worst defensive record in the Europa League group stage largely irrelevant.
Year Two, though, was always going to require a more critical eye.
Postecoglou’s unrepentant stance on sticking with a policy of all-out attack against high-level opposition from the continent felt like your drunken uncle informing you that he’s going to leave the accordion in the house next Hogmanay and take up fire-eating as his party piece. Brave and exciting and quite the spectacle, sans doute, but dangerous and doomed.
And, so, four fixtures in, it’s over. Look, Celtic have made a decent fist of it. They were terrific in the first half against Real Madrid. They should have beaten Shakhtar. They went toe-to-toe with RB Leipzig over two games, even though they simply weren’t good enough in the end.
They’ve been a little unlucky, too, in that the Leipzig side that lost heavily to Shakhtar are a better side under new coach Marco Rose than they were under Domenico Tedesco. Yet, an old problem remains. Going out all guns blazing against sharp and superfit rivals tends to end with you shooting your bolt. Being on it for an hour before running out of gas is only going to end one way against proper opposition. Simply not being Rangers — stale and done and chucking it in big games to make Seville look ever more like some kind of inexplicable daydream — is no consolation. After all, it was measuring themselves purely against the Ibrox side instead of trying to keep pace with the outside world that got Celtic into the pickle they were in before Postecoglou arrived in the Batmobile.
Unless they can beat Shakhtar and somehow take a point from the Bernabeu in Matchday Six, they won’t make the Europa League.
It is frustrating as that would, undoubtedly, be a more appropriate arena in which to judge Postecoglou’s suitability for a key area of his job — preventing Celtic being regarded as plankton by anyone outside Scotland — than the high-finance shark tank of the Champions League.
Yet, the Shakhtar game still gives him an opportunity to prove he can deliver going forward. To show he really is learning along with his players and making progress. That he is not destined to end this season having won fewer games in Europe than Jack Ross.
The Ukrainians are a good side. Although possessing a prodigious talent in young striker Mykhaylo Mudryk and a trio of overseas stars, transfer sales and FIFA allowing foreign players to cancel contracts have altered their dynamic.
They are very, very credible opposition, but beatable. Exactly the kind of side Postecoglou has to be defeating to make a point and make a start on repairing all the damage done to Celtic’s name by Malmo and Maribor and Cluj and Sparta Prague’s reserves, and the whole 19 years since they last won a knockout tie in UEFA competition.
Because, make no mistake, that must now be a central part of Postecoglou’s remit. Back in September 2020, major shareholder Dermot Desmond insisted that Europe was ‘so important as a yardstick of our football progress’.
In combing over the wreckage from that Bodo/Glimt hammering in February, Postecoglou, himself, stated: ‘When you look at our European campaign, ultimately, we haven’t succeeded, so that’s the bottom line — irrespective of improvement or learnings. At this football club, we should be making an impact in Europe and it is my job to make sure we do that.’
You can’t say these things and not follow through.
Postecoglou is in with the bricks at Celtic. He’s a hero. Nothing that can happen in Europe this season will change that. But he needs to prove he has all the answers they require on all fronts to become a real forward-facing club — and shots-on-goal statistics, in the end, will only wash for so long when they aren’t delivering the goods.