Tag: Celtic TV

Celtic begin summer clearout and the season ticket debacle begins.

wayofthecass

The pre-season is now officially upon us and not surprisingly due to what’s going on in the world teams are shedding players from their squads across Scotland at a rate of knots.

That would usually be the case to an extent up here in any case what with so many signed on short term contracts these days but it really is quite startling just how many out of contract players have been allowed to depart without being offered new terms from the moment the calendar hit June 1st.

As for Celtic, the club has pretty succinctly bid farewell to first-team squad players Jonny Hayes and Jozo Simunovic with fringe player Calvin Miller also exiting.

All three players were out of contract and under normal circumstances, Hayes and Jozo may have been offered season-long extensions but in these precarious times, it would appear there is no room for sentiment or a bloated squad.

After impressing at Aberdeen where he was their star player Jonny completed a dream ÂŁ1.3 million move to Celtic in the summer of 2017 and went on to make a very respectable 68 appearances for the club over three seasons, some of which was impacted by injury, and scored two goals.

Mostly fitting in as a utility player on the left side he offered cover for the left-back position and from the subs bench, he was often deployed in a more attacking role.

The highlight of his time at the club was undoubtedly him scoring the second goal in injury time to secure a resounding 2-0 win over a fancied Rangers side at Ibrox on a sunny day on the 1st of September 2019.

A bit of a marmite player amongst the Celtic support no one can ever deny the fact Jonny gave 100% for the jersey and was happy to play in any position where cover was required.

Celtic's Jonny Hayes celebrates his winner during the Ladbrokes ...
Jonny bids farewell. 

Personally, I’ll never forget the tireless shift he put in during our memorable 2-1 win over Lazio at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico last year.

Soon to turn 33 it would be no surprise to see him turn out for a top-six Scottish Premiership or English Championship side next season.

Now we move onto Jozo Simunovic, the Croatian under-21 internationalist who was the biggest signing of the Ronny Deila era after being brought in for a significant fee from Dinamo Zagreb in the wake of Virgil Van Djik’s transfer to Southampton in September 2015.

Big Jozo cost anywhere from ÂŁ3.5 to ÂŁ6.75 million depending on what source you read which was a considerable chunk of the initial ÂŁ13 million Celtic received for Dutch internationalist Van Djik though Celtic ultimately received far more than that for the Dutchman over the years due to various contractual add-ons.

Either way, he wasn’t cheap and much was expected though sadly injury blighted much of his initial time at the club.

He nearly departed for Torino in the summer of 2016 as Brendan Rodgers was beginning his Celtic revolution but the move fell through at the last minute and it was credit to the big Croat for how he reacted throughout.

Sitting outside a sun-kissed cafe, in Turn, awaiting news on developments a Sky Sports News reporter had tracked him down and was determined for him to say something that might be a slight to the club he was on the verge of departing but big Jozo apparently well aware of the politics of football just smiled and stated he had no ill-feeling towards Celtic and was fine with returning to fight for his place should the proposed move to Torino his agent was trying to barter fall through.

In the end, it did and he spent the next four years with the men in hoops.

Often blighted by injuries and with first-team appearances at a premium due to the likes of Boyata, Ajer and laterally recent signing Christopher Jullien being preferred ahead of him he, unfortunately, committed a few defensive howlers when he did get opportunities such as in big European games against Anderlecht and Copenhagen at Celtic Park – the second of which effectively eliminated us from the Europea League knockout phase back in February – and he was sent off at Ibrox against Rangers though we recovered to beat the light blues 3-2 in any case.

Still only 25 it’s safe to say he’ll get plenty of opportunities on the continent and though he failed to live up to his large transfer fee he leaves with two great individual memories the first being scoring the goal to beat Kilmarnock in April of last year that paid tribute perfectly to the recently departed club legend Billy McNeill and then that unforgettable crunching tackle on Kenny Miller that sent the Rangers captain into orbit during Celtic’s resounding 5-1 thumping of the light blues on their own patch back on the 29th of April 2017.

Kenny Miller says referee John Beaton was too lenient | Daily Mail ...
Jozo leaves Kenny Miller in no doubt whose ball it is.

He leaves the club having made 129 appearances and scored five times.

Incredibly he also departs with eleven winners medals to go with the five he’d previously claimed at first club Zagreb. Not a bad haul for a guy still two months away from his 26th birthday.

As for Calvin Miller alas there isn’t much to tell and the 22-year-old probably now regrets not taking up an offer to move to Kilmarnock permanently last summer.

Instead, he decided to see out the final year of his contract at Celtic where he spent most of his time on the sidelines injured.

In total, he made five first-team appearances for Celtic.

Now onto when the game will return and it looks like it’ll be early August and barring some incredible turnaround in the coming two months, it’s pretty certain to be behind closed doors until possibly the end of the year.

Season tickets are on sale and the proposal is you can use them to watch all home games on Sky Sports with the specific details still to be ironed out.

I presumed the club would simply give all season ticket holders the right to have exclusive access to view all home games via Celtic TV like they do for foreign subscribers but it appears the deal has been done with Sky to provide coverage instead.

Rather than vainly attempt to describe how this would be possible, I’ll wait for more info to be forthcoming in greater detail from both the club and broadcaster.

With two months left before the season is proposed to begin, they have plenty of time to iron out the kinks.

Of course, English football is scheduled to return behind closed doors in two weeks time so rather like with the somewhat disastrous introduction of VAR to the top flight game down south last season, Scottish football can use the EPL and lower leagues as a Guinea Pig for what works and what doesn’t.

Things such as carboard cutouts of fans and piping in artificial fan reactions to the stadium have been proposed and could be farcical or may actually elevate it above the glorified training ground games it otherwise will inevitably be.

As Jock Stein said: “Football without fans is nothing.”

I have a feeling big Jock will be proven to be very right on that count in the coming months.

 

 

 

Celtic 2-0 Hibs: DĂ©jĂ  Vu at the top and pantomime season lingers on at Pittodrie.

wayofthecass

Another game. Another Celtic victory. Oh and another clean sheet. So that’s 6-0 now in terms of the 2019 winning streak and 16-0 on aggregate since returning from the break. These intros are now more or less writing themselves.

So last night Celtic secured another three points as the march towards eight consecutive titles rolls on. As expected a somewhat demoralised Hibs team in disarray since the departure of their manager Neil Lennon offered little. In their dugout, Eddie May continues to look as about uncomfortable as a pilgrim in an unholy land no doubt suffering flashbacks to his ever so brief yet disastrous tenure at the helm of Falkirk nearly a decade ago. Time flies. He also disclosed after the match he’d put off having a vasectomy so as to attend the game. That’s commitment. Either that or he bottled it.

Under Lennon, Hibs were a challenge every time we met them. Indeed in the last six league encounters between us and them, we’d only beaten them twice suffering two defeats and drawing twice in the process with an aggregate score of 10-10. Every game had been free-scoring save one with goals flying in at either end. However last night they offered little and Celtic pretty much did as they pleased with Timothy Weah and Scott Sinclair both going close before Jeremy Toljan cut in from the right to feed Christie in the box and the Scotland internationalist turned and buried it nicely to open the scoring on 24 mins. The rest of the half was more of the same.

Image result for celtic 2-0 hibs
That’s the way to do it. 

In the second half, Celtic continued to create chance after chance and it should have been two when Boyata’s point-blank header was saved magnificently by Ofir Marciano. But the points were wrapped up finally on 63 mins when McGregor fed Christie from his own half and he scampered forward before releasing Burke with a nicely placed through ball that was duly executed in the box by that man Oliver Burke who finished via a deflection from the diving Darren McGregor which dinked over the despairing Marciano.

As a result, Celtic move onto 57 points with their third consecutive 2-0 win and remain six points clear of second-placed Rangers who stayed in contention thanks to a 4-2 win at Pittodrie over Aberdeen which sees the Govan based side pull five points ahead of the Dons after a controversy-filled affair. Having gone into the break 3-1 up thanks to two goals from Alfredo Morelos and the customary penalty for James Tavernier all looked comfortable before Englishman Tavernier conceded a penalty in his own box early in the second half that was converted by recent goal machine Sam Cosgrove. Then back up the other end, that man Morelos continued his pantomime style approach to the beautiful game as he raked a foot down alleged Celtic target Scott McKenna before appearing to take a stud to the face as the big Reds defender retaliated. Morelos went down like he’d been tasered by Grampians finest and both were subsequently shown red cards. Thereafter the home side dominated and were unlucky not to get another penalty when Allan McGregor unsuccessfully tried to break the shin of young Lewis Ferguson before a breakaway deep into injury time saw Jermain Defoe bury his new sides fourth goal and secure the points.

Earlier on today Alfredo Morelos red card was rather brazenly appealed by his employers. If the SPFL – or is it the SFA? – actually, entertain it never mind overturn the original decision then any last lingering shreds of credibility the ruling body have in Scottish football will be thoroughly doused in petrol and incinerated for good. It would be lunacy. So that’s probably why it might happen.

Image result for morelos mckenna
Morelos was fine in the end by the way.

As the candles dimmed on Aberdeens’ unlikely title challenge they were also more or less extinguished over at Dens Park where Kilmarnock were held to a 2-2 draw by relegation battlers Dundee. 2-1 down at halftime Steve Clarke’s men got it back to equal terms thanks to a spectacular free-kick from Chris Burke and then laid siege to their host’s goal before Kenny Miller raced clear on the break in the dying embers and won a penalty. He stepped up to covert but fluffed it though and Dundee passed up the chance for two undeserved but vital extra points.

Livingston stopped the rot of their recent five-game losing run by batoning down the hatches at Tynecastle and securing a 0-0 draw against their favourite team Hearts whilst the Brian Rice revolution got off to a flyer at New Douglas Park thanks to a 2-1 win for his new charges Hamilton Accies against St.Johnstone for whom the wheels have really come off recently. That’s their fourth league loss on the spin having only lost two of their previous thirteen.

The season of woe over in Paisley continues for St.Mirren and their beleaguered manager Oran Kearney. They suffered their sixth loss in a row on league duty via a 2-1 home defeat to Motherwell and that’s their 19th in 25 in what has been a truly awful campaign. Their 0-0 draw in his first match against us back in mid-September must feel like a managerial lifetime ago for Kearney and you wonder just how much longer it can go on for before the latest axe swings on a Premiership manager’s head.

As for the rejuvenated Motherwell, that’s their fifth straight league win in a row now with nine goals scored and only two conceded. Youngsters such as Jake Hastie, Allan Campbell and David Turnbull have really come into form and they now look almost odds on to catch struggling St.Johnstone for a top six place which seemed nigh on impossible going into the winter break.

This weekend it’s back to the cup and we entertain that very team I’ve just written off in St.Johnstone on Sunday. Injury wise we are still likely to be without Odsonne Edouard and James Forrest with Tierney, Rogic, Benkovic and Griffiths also still way off.  Emilio  Izaguirre could also struggle after suffering a heavy tackle to his ankle last night though according to Brendan it’s not as bad as first feared.  Bayo made the bench last night and might see some game time but again the expectations will lie with our go-to guys McGregor and Christie as well as the new Timothy Weah / Olly Burke connection.

Kilmarnock will be hoping to repeat their recent win over Rangers in the Saturday evening game and there will be all the razmataz and glamour of the Highland Derby on Monday night. Expect Dundee Utd to also fancy themselves at a dejected St.Mirren in what could be another nail in Oran Kearney’s Scottish football management coffin.