Yet another heavy preseason defeat

Celtic’s demoralising 4-1 reverse at the hand of Newcastle United last night has had the hacks sharpening their crayons in order to belittle our seasons ambitions for the coming term. Rankgers FC must be ecstatic that their latest "Gonnie no sign ofensuve songs" will be buried down the headlines list this morning.

If you remember back to this time last year, Celtic got torn apart by a Manchester United team that Celtic went on to beat over two legs in the Champions League. Whilst I am aware that the team that tore us apart in July was half populated with fringe players, it didn’t seem to affect our season too badly.

The old cliched arguments regarding preseason have been trawled out ad-nauseum so I will desist from mentioning them any further. What I will add however is that there were positives to be taken from last night’s defeat and we still have 4 weeks to source and sign players to prevent this early malaise affecting our season proper.

The main positives to be taken from last night are mainly derived from our second half performance and the amount of decent chances we created. The partnership of Brown and Donati appeared to be fruitful and robust. The energy and dynamism of the former coupled with the all round ability of the later should prove to be too potent much for most of our domestic competitors this season.

The defence continues to look a little shaky, especially the full back positions but it is hard to fully assess the strengths and weaknesses of this group of players until the competitive games commence. With such fierce competition for places in this area no-one will want to hand an advantage to a team mate by getting themselves injured flying into saving tackles in a friendly. Having said that though, the commitment to the tackle from Captain-elect Stephen McManus was great to see. You know when you’ve been tackled by Big Mick!

We do however still require more options for the full back positions than Wilson and Naylor. Paul Caddis is one for the future and did appear a little out of his depth last night.

So it is with measured confidence that we head into next weeks opening game with Killie, with the game against Parma still to come on Sunday. I for one think that the team is taking shape but still requires a little remedial surgery to repair a few cracks and one or two new faces to augment the defence.

Yours in Celtic

Clydebuilt