Wednesday Night

Just wanted to point out my main points from Wednesday Night.

Firstly was Celtics tactics. It was so interesting to watch the game unfold, especially in the first half. The bhoys set out their stall to pack the centre channel of the pitch and almost begged Barca to play the ball to the wings. We left huge space down the wing knowing that barca would not want to throw crosses into the box. The starting position of the fullbacks was always on the edge of the box then they obviously had been instructed to quickly close if and when it did go wide. This worked so well all night (thought the full backs and in particular Mathews were immense). in fact the most trouble we were caused was near the end of the first half when Dani Alves threw in a couple of early crosses that we struggled to deal with. With then almost every player covering the centre of the pitch Barca found it very difficult to play their way through. Also, it was obvious that Lennon and the coaching staff had worked on covering the one-two's (barca's fav way of creating space) as it was noticable that the players were following the man every time and we made numerous interceptions of attempted one-two's. Overall i think the coaching staff (and the players for carrying it out) deserve immense credit for devising these tactics. They had obviously looked at it and said 'we aint going have much possesion anyway so lets let them have it, and work out how we stop them getting through' and it worked a treat for most of the game. A big endorsment of lenny and his coaching team i think.

Secondly i think it should be pointed out that Celtic managed to get a win and almost a draw from Barca in two games while picking up only one yellow card in each game. Considering how easy the barca players go to ground and how much possesion they had in both games, i think this is great testament to the concentration and abiltiy of the payers at sticking to the game plan. Before the first game i was listening to Talksport and they basically said that any team, never mind Celtic, need to kick Barcelona off the pitch to stop them..and actually discussed 'taking out' Messi to stop him. I think Celtic showed that all you need is good tactics, great concentration and huge work ethic (and also a little luck).

Sorry for the length of this lol