DMAA

It’s not just his defending that’s going wrong though. Keeps making mistakes with his passing.

I don’t know what’s happened to Barisic. He can’t find the consistency of last season at all.

Nerve shredding stuff. I was surprised how confident people were for this one. A 2 goal lead isn’t much if a team like this really want to win. They are levels above us, regardless of last week. I hope we won’t be rueing that big miss from Arfield. Big 45 minutes ahead. We need to change something at the back though. They are slicing us wide open time and time again and seem to have loads of space, the goals were coming. GVB needs to try to do something.

I went back to the link I had used and yes, it said 2021-22 prize money in the title and then listed 2018-19 numbers underneath! That explains it. Despite the winners prize money having more than doubled since 18-19, for the rounds we are likely to make it remains almost exactly the same. Every change UEFA makes affecting finance is geared towards benefiting the bigger clubs.

There isn’t a huge difference in the conference league prize money tbh, the winners actually get more than the Europa League winners. So it’s a big bonus for us if Celtic go out. The money really adds up when you add in the ticket money.

The money to go another round further would be very welcome. I’m not sure exactly what it would be but you’re getting the prize money plus another sell out home game with high ticket prices and added broadcasting revenue too.

It’s just incredible to be in this position and we have the team to thank for that.

Mirko Ivanic. Yeh that was a very interesting link, scores a lot of goals in a very similar team/league. Interestingly Red Star are also 2nd after having an incredible season last season, just like us. They ended with 108 points from 38 league games and undefeated. They also unexpectedly tumbled out of the Chmpions League against lesser opposition (Sheriff). There's definitely something in it psychologically, it's really hard to follow up a season like that. Slavia Prague are similar, undefeated last season, tumbled out of the Champions League against Ferencvaros and are only top on goal difference, with no strong challengers.

It feels a lot like this time in the 19/20 season at the moment with the same issue causing us trouble. Remember the 1-0 loss to Hamilton? Roofe, Ramsey and Diallo all add a goal threat to the squad though (whatever you think of them). I do think we will have recurring issues with goal scoring with a front 4 of Kent, Morelos, Aribo and Arfield though and we need to start getting Roofe at least into the team. He played a huge part in the months that won us the league last season with 8 goals in 9 (November and December).

I'm not sure that we do though. I had a look at the stats graphs of all their signings on Twitter when they signed so I could get an idea of the type of player they were getting. Abada and Kyogo's graphs showed that they excelled at scoring goals, they had ridiculously high xG for their positions. The Greek guy very much had the stats graph of a poacher too. None of those players looked great in general on the stats graph, but they did excel at goal-scoring. They have bailed Celtic out time and time again from very similar games to the ones we've had where we haven't found that winner. Roofe is the only player we have who I would really put in that category. I think Ramsey is a very high xG player for his position too but that's a different position. Sakala has done well generally but I wouldn't put him in that category.

I’ve been a bit worried for a while that we don’t have as many goalscorers in the team as Celtic do. We should have scored far more than 1 yesterday, and they found a goal from a poacher again.

Don’t mention the war remember

Sensational. Take a bow, every one of you. A ridiculous result, an unexpected cash bonus and coefficient bonus and yet another reputation boost in Europe too. Well done Gio after I had my pre-match doubts.

Overzealous pressing there again though. The pressing has to be so disciplined at this level as this team really know how to take advantage.

Absolutely incredible

Some of our pressing doesn’t look purposeful at all. We’re taking 4 players out of the game by pressing a ball we have no chance of getting and it almost cost us there.

I'm not sure about that lineup. It's lacking in defensive ability in the midfield. Playing Arfield, Aribo, Kent and Morelos seems very attacking. Kamara should be in there at least to shore us up a bit. Sakala and Roofe are a loss obviously, our options on the bench are much weaker as a result. The vaccination rumour must have been true.

Jeezo, they really are petty.

Yeh I do too tbh. Hopefully he learned a couple of things from the old firm. A bit of a curveball but I wonder if Sands could play as he is more of a defensive midfielder than most. You have to think about off the ball abilities for this game.

Although it's a free hit, in some ways this is still a test of sorts for GVB. I guessed before the old firm that GVBs Rangers wouldn't be as compact and as solid as Gerrard's and it certainly seemed that way. Gerrard's failures were largely an inability to consistently do the job against smaller teams. In his final season, he overcame that hurdle in the league, though it remained in the cups. His successes on the other hand were largely his ability to perform very consistently against good opposition; old firm matches and Europe. I expect Dortmund will be looking to put this game to bed in the first leg so that they can rest good players in the second leg, but a good manager would still find a way to make things difficult for them so I'm keen to see how we do tactically. Looking at Dortmund's results, they score a lot but they concede like a mid table/bottom half side. Stopping them from scoring will be near impossible but it seems we need to make sure we have a counter attacking threat because this isn't the defensively solid Dortmund of a number of seasons ago.

His stock seems low at the moment, it would be a good time to go for him.

The game was going to be different in the second half to be fair. In-game changes were absolutely essential after about 10 minutes to stop them slicing through us down the right hand side but they weren’t made and we paid the price.

By the way, I would like to see Gerrard’s diamond against them. CCV started almost all their attacks with incisive passes to Juranovic or Abada. If we had two strikers we could cut that out at source. It would present other challenges but it might have worked better than the wide 4-3-3 anyway which was absolutely disastrous with one pass repeatedly getting them into a promising position on the right and Kent in no man’s land.

I think Jack deserves a MOTM to his name.

100%. They were very well coached, and we hadn’t done our homework. There’s individual responsibility in there too, experienced players being drawn to the ball like moths to a flame.