Carl Starfelt believes Celtic have made big improvements when it comes to our set-piece defending after recently letting in some major goalscoring opportunities.
Last month, the Hoops suffered some poor set-piece losses as static defending led to careless goals being conceded. The Hoops shipped 2 goals at Pittodrie from free-kicks before Dundee similar at Celtic Park with a corner and a free-kick delivery.
Bodo/Glimt also created some big chances in Norway last week through corner-kicks in particular. However, Starfelt believes Celtic have made improvements and appears to think they’ve been on show recently.
Speaking via Celtic YouTube, Carl said: “Yes, we’re working on all of the elements in our game – set pieces is one of them. In recent games, or maybe not recent games but some games before, we were letting in some goals from set pieces.
“We don’t want to let in any goals so of course we’ve tried to improve that. And of course we’ve been letting very few goals from other ways and areas in the game.
“So of course we are also working on set pieces and I think in the last games it’s been looking very good.”
Nothing to indicate Celtic have made strides in defending set-pieces yet
Whilst we’re all for bigging up any improvements and developments Celtic make as a team, the truth it’s going over the top to suggest we’ve shown we’re more commanding in defending set-pieces and cross balls.
Let’s not forget that Bodo/Glimt also netted against us with a low ball across the face of goal at Parkhead too. Just because Hibs were so toothless going forward isn’t exactly proof we’ve made major strides.
It was positive to see Celtic get a clean sheet at Easter Road whilst managing to ensure Joe Hart didn’t really have a thing to do. But again, it doesn’t suggest we’ve improved our set-piece defending. Hibs only had 3 corners in the entire game on Sunday. We had 9 and failed to score from one – that doesn’t exactly make Hibs brilliant set-piece defenders [BBC].
We can only really make a judgement on this further down the line when we’ve played 5 or 6 games with plenty of corners and free-kicks coming into our penalty box. Only then will we get an informed opinion on whether we’ve bucked up our ideas in that department.
It’s of course understandable to see Starfelt push the clean sheet on Sunday. Celtic’s defensive record this season has been fantastic with only 17 league goals conceded in 28 matches so far. To put that into perspective, it’s 7 less than Rangers have shipped.
But it’ll take a while before the Celtic defence can convince us we’ve improved our cross-balls and set-piece defending. As always of course, it’s good to see some confidence coming out of the dressing room.
In other news, St Mirren boss wants his players to carry out an extremely risky instruction at Celtic Park
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