“My gut tells me”; Celtic boss appears to have pinpointed what went wrong on Thursday

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Celtic boss Ange Postecoglou has identified what he believes the difference was between his side and Bodo/Glimt on Thursday night.

The Hoops were left smarting as their unbeaten record in 2022 came to an end. The Norwegian champions rocked up at Parkhead and took a 3-1 success back home for the second leg of their Europa Conference League last-32 tie.

Already, it’s looking like a seismic task to overturn the deficit and qualify for the last-16. Hugely disappointing it has to be said given the expectation we had heading into the competition. The performance levels on Thursday night just weren’t good enough as we failed to show enough invention to break down Kjetil Knutsen’s side.

And Ange appears to have clarified his own opinion on why things didn’t work out as planned as he pinpointed a lack of a clinical edge to his side.

As quoted by the Daily Record, Postecoglou said: “You can look for a million different theories about why we didn’t win on Thursday night. My gut tells me it comes down to if you’re really clinical in the front third you can win on any given day and if you’re not you can lose on any given day.

“That is what happened to us on Thursday. It wasn’t so much about our performance, it is about what happened in the two boxes. They were super clinical, we weren’t.

“People have seen enough of this team to know we are not going to go over there and lie down. We will go there and have a go. That’s the script football writes for you, the challenge for us now. To go there and challenge what may be the outcome of the story everyone thinks it will be.”

Many reasons as to why things went wrong on Thursday – huge chance to bounce back today

Ange is right to pinpoint how poor we were in the final third. The truth is that we didn’t create anywhere near enough and looked second-best when it came to our creativity levels. Bodo/Glimt looked a threat every time they went up the park – could we honestly say the same about our performance?

In addition to that, defensively we were all at sea for all 3 of the goals. For goals number 1 and 3 there was far too much space where our defensive midfielders should’ve been. This allowed Bodo to work sightings of goal that shouldn’t have been available to them.

The second goal is a hard watch. Ola Solbakken easily skins 2 of our covering defenders and the cutback simply isn’t dealt with. Amahl Pellegrino has far too much time around 6 yards out to pick his spot beyond Joe Hart. As poor as we were going forward, we didn’t cover ourselves in glory at the back either.

But today gives us the opportunity we desperately need to move one. It could end up being a very important day in the title-race for us. Rangers have a tricky-looking trip to Tannadice at 12pm before we host Dundee in a game that has “convincing Celtic win” written all over it.

It’s important not to be overly complacent, but you can see why there is so much confidence flowing around the place heading into this one. We’ve already scored 10 goals in 2 games against Dundee this season – 6 of them coming at Parkhead back in August. They’re the perfect opposition to bounce back against, and with the uncertainty of a managerial change causing chaos at Dens, this could be a fine time to strike.

A big 3 points today allows us to reset the minds and go again ahead of our second-leg vs Bodo on Thursday night. Hopefully, that’s exactly what happens as we look ahead to another huge day.

In other news, Dundee boss Mark McGhee in total admiration of Celtic’s “blinding football”