Tag: UEFA Champions League

Celtic smash seven past saints, the other results plus Cluj Champs League preview.

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Celtic got their title defence off to a flyer with a seven nil massacre of St.Johnstone at Celtic Park yesterday afternoon – Saturday afternoon at the time of publication.

In my last article, I had predicted a romp for Celtic based on the Perth sides woeful League Cup group section campaign throughout July which had seen them lost to newly-promoted Ross County though more pertinently to League One sides Forfar Athletic and Montrose.

Before the game, I listened to their manager Tommy Wright passionately defend his record at the club on BBC Sportsound which is telling as no one had actually called it into question and is more of a reflection of the pressure Wright must himself feel under and his frustrations at the fact they have lost nine first-team squad players over the summer with only a couple coming in and a striker badly needed.

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Joy for Christie and Johnstone but not so much for Tommy.

As much as I expected an inform Celtic, fresh from a 7-0 aggregate dismissal of Nomme Kalju in the Champions League qualifiers,  to put them to the sword I could never have predicted a 7-0 skelping which is the men from Perth’s worst result in 21 years and even eclipses the 6-0 scudding we gave them at McDiarmid Park last term.

Ryan Christie kept up his sparkling recent form with a hattrick. His first a beauty from the edge of the box and his third an even more spectacular finish with the one in the middle being a tad fortunate with Saints keeper Zander Clark not exactly covering himself in glory.

Mikey Johnstone had opened the scoring with a nice finish of his own after only nine mins and Ntcham, Edouard and Griffiths also delivered the goods with each executing fine finishes in the second half.

Hatem Abd Elhamed also made his debut and looked pretty good – let’s be honest if you can’t look good when your team is winning 7-0 then you never will – but sadly limped off in the second half. Let’s hope it isn’t too serious.

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Hatem in action.

A perfect way to start the title defence on a day in which our eighth consecutive title flag was fittingly unveiled by Liz McNeill and Sadie Chalmers, the wives of the legendary Billy McNeill and Stevie Chalmers, two immortal club legends who we lost earlier in the year.

Elsewhere over the weekend Livingston and Motherwell burst my coupon with a meandering 0-0 draw whilst Hibs stuttered before scoring late to beat struggling St.Mirren at Easter Road thanks to a Scott Allen goal. It’s early doors but from what I’ve seen thus far I’m not too impressed with Paul Heckingbottom’s English League One level purchases.  Last seasons Championship winners Ross County re-entered the top flight in style as they easily dismissed perennial relegation candidates Hamilton Accies 3-0 up in Dingwall.

Earlier on today Aberdeen won a rabble-rousing encounter at home to Hearts 3-2 with the Edinburgh side literally grasping defeat from the jaws of victory after throwing away 2-1 lead and seeing young 17-year-old Aaron Hickey sent off before Clévid Dikamona needlessly gave away a penalty which was converted by goal machine Sam Cosgrove before new singing Ryan Hedges blasted home a late winner.

Rangers also continued to provide further evidence that we have little to worry about this term as they struggled to a 2-1 away win at a Kilmarnock team coming off the back of a shambolic Europea League exit. Killie look like a pale imitation of the well-oiled machine Stevie Clarke had moulded them into last season but still dominated large swaths of the game and were unlucky to concede late to a Connor Goldson header.

But now let’s get back to our next European opponents in the 3rd Qualifying round of the Champions League.

They are of course CFR Cluj of Romania who have won back to back national titles and are managed by former Chelsea star Dan Petrescu.

He’s had great success on these shores before both as a player with Chelsea and in a coaching capacity with the now-defunct Unirea Urziceni who he led to a 4-1 Champions league groups stage hammering of Walter Smith’s Rangers back in 2009 at Ibrox.

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Cluj manager Dan Petrescu thinking about Celtic. 

Cluj themselves are currently enjoying the most successful period in their history having been formed way back in 1907 they only won their first top-flight title back in 2008 and very first national cup that same year.

They’ve won four more titles and three more cups since and have established themselves as the second biggest club in the country beyond the famous Steaua Bucharest.

So far this season they’ve won three and drawn one in the league and currently sit top of the division after hammering AFC Chindia Târgoviște 4-1 away yesterday. They’ve scored ten goals conceding only three in the process.

In Europe, the success story has continued as they bounced back from a 1-0 loss in Kazakhstan to Astana to win 3-1 at home to progress 3-2 on aggregate before then eliminating Maccabi Tel Aviv of Israel 3-2 on aggregate also after gaining a 2-2 draw away following on from a tight 1-0 home win.

Their squad isn’t full of stars and indeed Petrescu has boasted that both Astana and Tel Aviv had superior budgets so they haven’t achieved what they have by simply splashing the cash.

Experience is heavy in the team.

Attacking winger Ciprian Deac is 33 and has 20 caps for Romania. Defensive midfielder Ovidiu Hoban is 36 and has 30 caps for Romania. Their Portuguese captain Camora has no caps for his country but at 32 has played 240 games for Cluj. Recently signed striker Mario Rondón is 33, has over 100 career goals at eight previous clubs and 13 caps for Venezuela.

Veteran Argentine midfielder Emmanuel Culio is in his second spell at the club, is 36 and has played for 15 clubs in total and has been described by Petrescu as ‘the best player in Cluj’s history.’ Though apparently, he’s struggling to makes Wednesday nights encounter with fitness issues. So that’s good.

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Cluj’s ‘greatest ever player’ in action.

Up front, the ones to watch out for are big striker George Țucudean who was the leading striker in the Romanian top flight last season with 18 goals from 24 games and his strike partner, Frenchman Billel Omrani whose also a six-footer.

They haven’t made any big-name additions this summer but held onto the majority of their squad with no significant departures. It’s certainly an ageing squad but also a successful one and very consistent.

Last season despite their domestic success Malmo eliminated them from the Champions League qualifiers and in a big shock, Luxembourg’s F91 Dudelange put them out of Europe all together at the Europea League play-offs stage 5-2 on aggregate.

Currently, in the UEFA association coefficients, Romania sits at 29, nine places behind Scotland which gives you an idea of the sort of impact or lack of that their clubs have been making in Europe recently.

But their recent form has been good and this will be a definite step-up from what we came up against in the first two qualifying rounds.

They lost only one home game in the league last season but did lose two of their three home European ties and at home in the semi-finals of the national cup to former Celtic European opponents Astra Giurgiu so there is hope for optimism.

I think it’ll be tight but as much as I’d like to go with the ultra optimism of a comfortable win I’m going to go for a score draw at the Dr. Constantin Rădulescu Stadium on Wednesday night with us bringing them back to Celtic Park for a classic European home tie the following Tuesday.

It’s definitely doable and we’ll find out in the morning who we could potentially get in the Play-off round.

It’ll be the winner of Rosenborg vs Maribor, APOEL Nicosia, Young Boys or Slavia Prague.

The only one that makes me wary there is Young Boys. They won the league last season over Basel who’ve already eliminated PSV from the Champions League this season so safe to say that the Swiss champs will be pretty tasty.

Exciting times.

 

 

Celtic cruise into the Champions League 3rd Qualifying round and Cluj profiled.

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Celtic swatted aside Estonian Champions Nõmme Kalju 2-0 in Tallinn’s wonderfully named A. Le Coq Arena last night to progress rather easily 7-0 on aggregate.

Of course, after last Wednesday night’s romp at Celtic Park progression was never in any doubt but an away win is  never a guarantee for Celtic on the continent no matter who the opposition is and it was also important to keep up the winning momentum which now sees us having won four on the spin since returning to competitive action in the 1st Qualifying round against FK Sarajevo last month.

Bizarrely the host’s manager Roman Kozhukhovskyi thought his side suffered ‘an injustice’ last night but hey managers will say the strangest things to either shield their side from criticism or keep up morale. But the reality is that’s just complete and utter nonsense.

Celtic dominated possession all night, restricted the home side to few chances and should have scored more themselves.

Our new £7 million centre back Christopher Jullien made his debut and was towering, composed and comfortable on the ball all evening. He’ll have far more testing games than this of course but it was a nice start and he could even have scored at one point.

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Big Christopher shows his power.

Both Callum McGregor and James Forrest were rested for the night with the likes of  Bain, Ajer, Edouard and Christie dropping to the bench and in came not only Jullien but keeper Craig Gordon, Lewis Morgan, Mikey Johnston, Olivier Ntcham and in a real surprise Tony Ralston at right-back for a rare appearance.

Celtic took the lead on 10 mins when a Ntcham advanced to the edge of the box before feeding Johnston on the left byline who’s drive across the face of the goal evaded the keeper and looked to be tapped in by Leigh Griffiths only for it to be diverted into the net by the sliding  Aleksandr Kulinits. As much as the Celtic TV commentary wanted it to be Leigh’s I’m afraid it has to go down as an own goal.

Thereafter the game pretty much had a malaise about it with Celtic happy to dominate possession and the Estonians happy to keep the score down.  That was until the second half with Craig Gordon required to make a few half-decent saves before Celtic went back through the gears in the closing stages.

As mentioned earlier Jullien missed a chance with a header from six yards and then on came sub Marian Shved who within seconds of stepping onto the pitch was through on goal only to be denied by keeper Pavel Londak who began replicating some of his outstanding shot-stopping form from last week.

Both Lewis Morgan and Scott Sinclair were also denied by two wonderful saves from Londak who has certainly been Nõmme’s outstanding player over the two legs and Jullien had the ball in the net but it was ruled out for a high boot.

But just when it looked like we would have to settle for only the one up stepped Shved to score on his debut with a pearler into the keeper’s top left-hand corner of the net from the edge of the box in what turned out to be the last kick of the match on 93 minutes.

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Shved is off to a flyer. 

In the end, it was all rather easy peasy. If only all European ties were like that. Alas, they’re not and we’ll have a far sterner test in the 3rd Qualifying round in the form of Romanian Champions CFR Cluj.

Managed by Romanian football legend Dan Petrescu they have won their last two league championships back to back and five in total in their history.

Formed in 1907 they were really just a provincial club for their entire history until a major investment in the early 2000s by local businessman Árpád Pászkány helped push them back into the top flight where they have not only remained ever since but been frequent title challengers and trophy winners.

They nearly went to the wall back in 2014 due to financial insolvency but staved off liquidation and in early 2017 were taken over by wealthy business magnate Marian Băgăcean who subsequently appointed Petrescu that summer and they haven’t really looked back since.

Last season they pipped the far more well known Steaua Bucharest to the championship by two points to retain their title.

They lost only 3 out of 36 games, drawing 11, scoring only 54 but conceding a mere 20 so safe to say their tactics are to defend and keep it tight.

Though this approach seems conservative as a manager Petrescu certainly wasn’t as a player scoring 71 goals in club football alone as an attacking full-back and 12 for his country.

He played for the great Steaua team of the ’80s where we won four league championships and was a European Cup runner up playing alongside the legendary Gheorghe Hagi in 1989. He was also part of the team that eliminated Rangers from the 87/88 European Cup Quarterfinal a tie which featured Graeme Souness’s shocking challenge on Iosif Rotariu.

After a spell in Italy, he then spent eight years in England enjoying great success in an exciting Chelsea team alongside the likes of Ruud Gullit, Gianluca Vialli and Gianfranco Zola.

As a manager, he had success previously in his homeland with the now-defunct Unirea Urziceni who won the league under his stewardship as well as in Russia with Kuban Krasnodar who he led to the second tier title and promotion and in China with Jiangsu Suning whom he guided to the national cup in 2015.

He’s visited Glasgow before in a management capacity having led Unirea to a 4-1 pasting of Walter Smith’s Rangers at Ibrox in the Champions League back in the autumn of 2009.

Anyone else remember that?

 

Well, that was a nice stroll down memory lane but back to the present and we’ll be visiting Cluj’s compact and picturesque Dr. Constantin Rădulescu’s stadium next Tuesday for the first leg. It’s in the capital of Transylvania would you believe so expect the press to make a lot of vampire references in the lead up to the match as Celtic attempt to the put ‘a stake through the heart of Cluj’s Champions League hopes’ before ‘sinking their teeth into Cluj the following week at Celtic Park’ and so on and so forth.

So far this season Cluj have toppled Astana – who we know well and are no slouches – and Israeli Champions Maccabi Tel Aviv en route to the 3rd round so they’ve had a far harder route than we have.

But I’ll go into their European pedigree and players to watch out for next week in my preview to the first leg tie.

In the meantime, we prepare for our eighth consecutive flag day on Saturday against visiting St. Johnstone who have had a woeful build-up to the league kick-off so far which has seen them eliminated from the League Cup already after pretty shocking losses to League 1 sides Montrose and Forfar as well as to newly-promoted Ross County.

A slow summer has seen half a dozen first-team players depart – including the mercurial ex-Celtic Tony Watt – and only a few arrivals with the expected capture of former star striker Stevie May back to the club also recently collapsing.

So they don’t have their problems to seek and hopefully, we can capitalise on that and really turn them over.

Unfortunately, big Christopher Jullien won’t be able to make his domestic bow though as he’s carrying over a suspension from his time in the French top-flight last year which means we should see a partnership of big Simunovic and Ajer or Bitton returning to a back three. Either way, the emphasis should be on the attack and I’m pretty confident it will be a good send-off for Romania.

 

Celtic 5 – 0 Nõmme Kalju: Celtic rout Estonian champions in Champs League 2nd round qualifier.

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I said in my build-up piece to this game that Celtic should be turning this team over and effectively putting the tie to bed in the first leg and that’s pretty much what happened last night.

Celtic went with the unusual formation of 3-5-2 so for the first time in a long time we started with two men upfront something that Brendan Rodgers quite simply refused to entertain whilst in charge of the club.

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Celtic mean business.

This meant a first competitive start for Leigh Griffiths since November playing beside Odsonne Edouard which was refreshing to see though at the back £7 million summer signing Christopher Jullien continues to linger on the bench with Nir Bitton being preferred in beside Jozo Simunovic and Kristoffer Ajer.

I was actually quite surprised by our visitors in the first ten minutes or so. They seemed pretty energetic and combative and certainly gave the indication they weren’t there to lie down. But as the half progressed we got on the ball a lot more and proceeded to create chances as Nõmme increasingly began to pack their box in an attempt to keep us at bay.

Their keeper Pavel Londak made some impressive saves throughout the night beginning with pushing over the bar a stinging long-range drive from Ryan Christie. That set the tone for Chrisite who dominated proceedings as he continuously bore down on the opposition goal time after time.

Indeed it was one of his free-kick deliveries into the box that saw big Ajer head home the opener after 36 mins. And with the dam breached the floodgates well and truly opened as Celtic scored twice more before the break.

The first was a converted penalty by that man Christie after a needless handball in the box by Aleksandr Kulinits and the second was delivered by the returning Griiifths who pretty much made it a dream evening for himself with a trademark freekick that went up and over the Estonians wall giving the impressive Londak no chance.

The second half became a bit of a turkey shoot with Mikey Johnstone – who had come on for the unwell Bolingoli-Mbombo near the end of the first half – continuously cutting in from the left and another substitute Lewis Morgan – who replaced Leigh Griffiths on the hour mark – causing chaos down the right flank.

After several missed chances Ryan Christie finally put the tie to bed as he curled in a stunning finish on 65 minutes and Callum McGregor added the cherry on top with a fine low drive on the 77 mins mark.

So 5-0 and job done.

Olivier Ntcham also made his comeback to starting action replacing Christie on 71 mins – he actually got a pretty decent reception all things considered – and Leigh Griffiths received the man of the match award which was a nice touch though pretty dubious to say the least as Christie was the standout player all evening by some distance.

It could have been a lot more though in fairness Nõmme curved out a few decent opportunities themselves so no need to be greedy but if it wasn’t for Londak and some underwhelming finishing it really could have been double figures.

We’ll go over to Tallinn in five days for the second leg and let’s be honest it’s a bit of a formality now with the far sterner test of either Israeli champions Maccabi Tel Aviv or Romanian title holders CFR Cluj lying in wait in the 3rd round. Cluj currently hold a 1-0 lead going over to Israel for the second leg making Tel Aviv the slight favourites to progress. But as Montgomery said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

For now, we can bask in an impressive European performance on what was a fittingly balmy evening in the east end of Glasgow albeit against pretty underwhelming opposition though at this stage in the season it can be easy to get caught out by weaker teams who are already halfway through their domestic campaign.

Hopefully next week the stage will be set for Christopher Jullien to make his competitive debut and for Griffiths to get another runout and hopefully more goals. Ryan Christie really looks in the mood pretty much picking up from where he left off before injury curbed his season last April.

We also got to meet new signing Hatem Abd Elhamed at half time last night as he was introduced to the fans after completing his reported £1.7 million move from Celtic’s former Champions league qualifier opponents Hapoel Be’er Sheva.

A 28-year-old unknown utility man doesn’t exactly set the pulses racing but hopefully he proves the doubters, and there are plenty y of them, wrong and come good when he finally gets his opportunity.

That aside all reports seem to indicate that despite the Scottish press packs best efforts that Kieran Tierney will be going nowhere this summer as Arsenal and Napoli have failed to come up with requisite readies to actually buy him.

So more good news.

Let’s hope it stays that way.

Champions League Qualifiers preview: Celtic vs Nõmme Kalju.

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So tomorrow night Celtic entertain the visit of the illustrious champions of Estonia to our home ground in the 2nd round, 1st leg of the Champions League qualifiers.

Having disposed of FK Sarajevo 5-2 on aggregate in the 1st round it was pretty much expected that we would then be matched up with North Macedonian champions Shkendija after they had triumphed 1-0 away in Estonia in the first leg.

Byt the plucky Nõmme stunned everyone by turning it all around via a 2-1 win in Toše Proeski Arena, situated in the heart of the Macedonian capital of Skopje.

It’s pretty safe to say that they are pretty surprised to be here themselves.

Last season they won the Estonian top league (The Meistriliiga) for only the second time in their history thanks to a fantastic campaign that saw them go unbeaten through 36 league games with 25 wins and 11 draws, scoring an incredible 114 league goals into the bargain.

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Goal machine Liliu.

Alas, the 2019 season has not been so kind and they currently sit in 4th spot, 12 points behind leaders Flora having already lost two of the first 20 league games and have only scored 34 goals.

Brazilian marksman Liliu remains their top domestic scorer with nine goals in the league thus far but that’s way down on the 31 he bagged last season. Though he did head in the injury-time winner against Shkendija so safe to say he’s their dangerman.

They are also without title-winning manager Sergey Frantsev who was fired early in this years campaign after a poor start which seems a tad harsh considering the historic feats he led them to in 2018 but if Claudio Ranieri can get sacked after winning the title with Leicester then I guess anything can happen in modern football.

His replacement is the Ukranian Roman Kozhukhovskyi whose achievements are so vast he doesn’t even warrant a Wikipedia page.

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Roman Kozhukhovskyi. At least that’s what it says on the screen.

Squad wise it’s pretty much all domestic players save the aforementioned Liliu and club captain Maximiliano Uggè who hails from Treviglio, Italy and has racked up over 60 appearances for them though it’s difficult to quantify as details and stats on Estonian football are pretty thin on the ground.

Outside of those two, the other one to watch would be playmaker Igor Subbotin who provided 16 assists last year.

All that aside we really should be hammering them.

Scotland’s UEFA club coefficient is not great at 26 out of 55 – it was in the top 10 a decade ago – but Estonia’s is at 42.

Individually Celtic are placed at number 46 whilst Nõmme are at 288. By comparison, Sarajevo are rated at 231 though Shkendija place at 178 so perhaps it is all somewhat misleading.

They also play in a 650 seater stadium attracting crowds of a few hundred and lat season truly was an anomaly.

They are unbeaten in their last 16 domestic games as they begin to refind the form of last year though have drawn their last three, scoring only two goals in the process.

We’ve spent well over £10 million so far this summer acquiring the talents of Christopher Jullien, Luca Connell and Boli Bolingoli-Mbombo with Hatem Abd Elhamed also on the verge of singing at the time of writing and as a club are on a completely different level to the Estonians to such an extent that our visit next week has been compared to a Metallica rock concert by the mayor of Tallinn.

Even if we’d been drawn against the far bigger Estonian clubs such as FC Flora or FCI Levadia Tallinn – who between them have pretty much dominated Estonian football over the past quarter of a century – we’d still be expecting to skelp them so it should be the case even more so with the diminutive Nõmme Kalju.

So in summation…..no excuses.

Let’s hope we deliver the goods on what looks like it’ll be a balmy summer evening tomorrow in the east end of Glasgow and put the tie to bed with either Israel’s Maccabi Tel-Aviv or Romanian champions Cluj presenting a far more daunting task in the 3rd round.