It was yet another very comfortable night for Celtic as we kept our lead at the top of the Scottish Premiership to nine points with a 3-0 win at home to Livingston.
Livi no longer seem to be our bogey team as that is now four straight victories against the side that we used to struggle badly against. In three of those four victories we have scored three goals, and two of them were actually away games for us.
It just shows you how much this Celtic team is improving under Ange Postecoglou.
We now know exactly how to break these teams down and more often than not we take our chances when we get them.
There was a little bit of back and forth between both sets of managers in the lead up to the last night’s game, with Martindale making some ridiculous claim that Livi would be top of the league if he could spend what Celtic could and Ange had a little tongue in cheek comment back at him, and quite righty so.
After the game, it looked to me as both managers embraced at full-time that Martindale was telling Ange that he didn’t mean any disrespect by his comments and Ange said not to worry about it.
Which would make sense as Martindale was a lot more complimentary of Celtic and Ange in his post match interview.
“It was lucky I couldn’t get a reception, I was trying to get an Uber!” said Martindale.
“It was a really difficult game for us to lay a glove on them. But I did think we gifted them two goals. The second and third goals we’ve got to do a lot better defensively.”
“They’ve got international players. I’ve seen them do that to Real Madrid – they were probably the better team in that game for 60 minutes.”
“You’ve got to take your hat off to Ange. What he’s done at Celtic, he’s done it incredibly well.”
“It’s all right having money. It’s how you spend it and then it’s how you coach the players you bring in.”
He’s spot on with that last line, it’s not just about spending money, you have to bring in the right personalities, players with the right mentalities that are going to be able to come in and cope with the demands of playing for Celtic and be expected to win trophies, while also being able to play the way Ange Postecoglou wants them to play.
All these players then have to gel together and gel very quickly, especially in January, because you need to come in and hit the ground running.
And it was nice to see Martindale bring up the Real Madrid game too and how we performed against them at Celtic Park.
Hopefully that’s an end to Martindale’s snidey comments moving forward when talking about us, because there is simply on need for them, and they clearly aren’t helping his team out either.
