Analysis Corner: Old Firm Review - Adaptability is Key
By Dougie Wright (@dougie_analysis)
Writing about stats and football can sometimes be tricky. There are literally thousands of possible stats you can bring up about any given game. The trick is to find the ones that best convey the message that you want to send about what happened on the pitch. Sometimes, it can be like picking a needle from the proverbial haystack.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to look hard this week for a single stat to tell the tale of Celtic’s 2-0 victory over Rangers in the Scottish Cup semi-final this weekend.
Celtic scored their opening goal with ten minutes and eighteen seconds played. In that time, Rangers completed just three passes, two of which were from kick off.
From a tactical point of view, it seemed that Brendan Rodgers had outmaneuvered Pedro Caixinha from the start. Rangers were set up with a flat back four, three central midfielders, two strikers, and Kenny Miller sort of doing a bit of everything.
Bates and Wilson at the back were instructed not to let Dembele out of their sight, while it looked like Hyndman and Halliday were told to support their fullbacks out wide. This essentially left Jason Holt to hold the midfield against Stuart Armstrong, Callum McGregor and Scott Brown.
More importantly, Rangers defence and midfield sat deep. This meant that Waghorn, Garner and Miller were pointlessly running around trying to get the ball off Celtic’s back four (six when you factor in Scott Brown dropping in from midfield and Craig Gordon in goals). It was essentially a fool’s errand:
Even if the Rangers attackers did manage to nick the ball back, they were so massively outnumbered that Celtic would have just picked it right back off again.
So Celtic were given time and space to build up in their own half, but faced a sea of blue the further into Rangers’ half they ventured.
Moussa Dembele is worth a lot more than goals to Celtic. The striker’s hold up play is fantastic. His control means that, if Celtic are facing a packed defence, they can ping a ball up the park to the Frenchman who has a very good chance of being able to do something with it.
Left foot, right foot, chest, thigh, wherever. He’s got the pace to run onto balls in behind, and the strength to challenge defenders in a battle.
This came in particularly useful on Saturday against a deep, compact Rangers side. Lustig had all the time in the world to play a pinpoint pass from his own half into a channel Dembele had created for himself.
At the left-hand side of the screen, you can see Dembele the moment he’s taken down the ball. One touch is all it takes to cushion the ball to a standstill in the penalty box and turn to check for support. Callum McGregor was there providing it, making a lung busting run (arrowed) from the far side of the pitch where you’d usually expect a Rangers midfield to be.
When your game plan is to frustrate the opposition and sit in tight, it’s not a good thing to concede early. To tell the truth, Rangers looked dazed afterwards. While they completed three passes in the opening ten minutes, the fact they only completed fifteen more by the twenty minute mark shows a sheer lack of reaction on Rangers’ part.
Indeed, it took them up until the forty first minute to get a clean shot away, with Kenny Miller blasting well over the bar from thirty yards out.
The second half was a different story, as Dodoo and McKay came on to change the team to a 4-4-2 formation. The team pressed high right from kick off, as they tried to nab an equalizer early on.
When Dembele went off after twenty minutes, he was replaced by Leigh Griffiths. While the Scotland striker may not have the Frenchman’s hold up play, he excels on running onto balls in behind the last defender. So when Rangers pushed higher at the start of the second half, it took five minutes for Celtic to play a ball in behind, win a penalty and effectively kill the game.
In fairness, Rangers did manage to create three good chances in the remainder of the second half, but Waghorn and Miller were clearly too tired from all the pointless pressing they’d had to do in the first half to be able to concentrate on finishing these chances.
The first ten minutes of each half provide a microcosm of Celtic’s success this season: their adaptability. Faced with a deep, compact defence in the first half, they have the confidence to pass the ball from the back, and use Dembele’s hold up play to bypass the midfield. In the second half, against a team that pushed up a little higher, they showed they had the accuracy of passing to play killer balls in behind the backline.
For Rangers, they face the same opponents this weekend. They have a list of things going in their favour: home advantage, Celtic (probably) missing both Scott Brown and Moussa Dembele, plus the fact that Celtic have already won the league while Aberdeen can still technically be caught.
However, for any of that to take on any relevance at all, Pedro Caixinha must prove that his team can adapt as well as his opponents did on Sunday.
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