France U21 talent's brilliant Celtic admission ahead of Bayer Leverkusen clash

By David Walton

November 24, 2021

Bayer Leverkusen’s France under-21 international Amine Adli has provided some class comments on Celtic as he bigged up the threat posed the Hoops.

Leverkusen and Celtic will face in a Europa League crunch battle tomorrow night. A positive result is essential if Celtic are to progress into the last-32 of the competition. However, we couldn’t have asked for a more difficult fixture.

The Bundesliga heavyweights rocked up at Parkhead and smashed home 4 back in September. But it came at a time when Celtic’s squad wasn’t yet settled and Ange Postecoglou was still finding his feet.

But at the same time, Celtic created a host of opportunities on the night. And Adli has admitted to the Hoops’ strength and believes that only the heroics of goalkeeper Lukas Hradecky saved them from a more intense encounter.

As quoted by the Glasgow Times, the France U21 starlet said: “We think Celtic is a very strong team because they have a lot of players with high quality and a lot of experience. They play very physically and with a lot of energy. So we have to counter it. I think it will be a nice game to watch for the spectators with a lot of attacks. I am expecting a great game.

“The game in Glasgow was very good for us. We scored four times. But our goalkeeper saved us in various moments. So our target should be to be as effective as we were in Glasgow in front of the opponent’s goal, but we should not make so many mistakes when we have the ball.

“Of course we were lucky once in a while. For example in Glasgow, especially at the beginning of the game, Celtic had a lot of chances. But Lukas had a very good day and we scored at the right times.”

Celtic simply have to be ruthless in Germany

If Celtic create 2 early chances in Germany and miss them, the game will be over. The reason? We have to be as ruthless as possible when we head to the BayArena for tomorrow’s encounter.

The truth is that we weren’t let down by defensive frailties against Leverkusen in Glasgow. It was fashionable to have a pop at the defence in that period of the season. A period in which we were all still finding out about ourselves under Ange.

Where we went wrong was in missing the sitters up the other end. The man who had the biggest howlers of the night was actually Kyogo Furuhashi. There were at least 3 golden opportunities that he really should’ve taken. Not to mention Liel Abada’s poor second-half miss.

Had we taken all of those chances, we were looking at a different game. We were looking at a game in which Leverkusen would’ve been tested to the max on both a physical and emotional level. Instead, it felt more like a walk in the park for the Germans.

Celtic will therefore need to take all of the chances they receive in Germany. We have to acknowledge that Leverkusen are highly likely to get on the scoresheet themselves. They’re that explosive that we have to open ourselves up to some realism.

But we know how creative this Celtic side can be. We’ll test Hradecky again this week. And so long as we’re a lot more efficient in front of goal, we’ll have a good chance of earning something.

In other news, “Baffling”; Hibs have today continued their incessant moaning ahead of Celtic clash