Celtic face Wolves in Dublin on Saturday in our penultimate friendly fixture.
It’s been a pretty speedy run through pre-season this year. Fans have only seen the team play a couple of matches in Japan, and now we’re just a week away from the competitive action starting.
The clash against Julen Lopetegui’s side is likely to be our toughest of pre-season so far. Wolves finished 13th in the Premier League last season, but would likely have placed higher had the Spaniard been in place for the entire season.
The Molineux side have actually been in Portugal for the past week at the very same ‘Campus’ training centre we sampled earlier in the month. (Wolves)
They have beaten Portuguese opposition Vitoria Guimaraes and Porto already this summer.
Their squad maybe isn’t quite as stacked with talent as you’d expect from a Premier League team, especially when Rúben Neves and Diego Costa have both recently departed.
Their most notable players would probably be Irish home favourite Matt Doherty, formerly of Tottenham Hotspur, Atletico Madrid (and Hibernian), and speedy attacker Daniel Podence.
They also have Brazilian forward Matheus Cunha who they signed for £44m from Atletico Madrid. Cunha joined initially on a winter loan with a permanent obligation for the summer. Not too disimilar to our aquistion of Tomoki Iwata. (Guardian)
Cunha also has some history against Celtic, and has even scored against us in the past. Back in 2018, he netted one of RB Leipzig’s goals in a 2-0 Europa League win against Brendan Rodgers’ Hoops.
He also played in Leipzig’s defeat at Celtic Park a few weeks later.
On Rodgers, his record against Wolves as Leicester manager was pretty strong. Rodgers faced Wolves seven times in his four years with the Foxes, winning three, drawing three and losing just once. (Euro Rivals)
Rather worryingly ahead of tomorrow, all three draws were goalless. More promisingly, his last meeting with Wolves saw Leicester run out 4-0 winners at Molineux.
We’d take a similar result on Saturday.
In other news, Celtic fans are set for disruption as a large sporting event comes to Glasgow
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