Celtic defeated ‘Rangers’ 3-2 in a thrilling game at Celtic Park this afternoon to go 12 points clear at the top of the Scottish Premiership.
It was a nervy game to watch at times as a Celtic supporter as we were definitely not at our best today and made so many slack passes it was unbeleivable.
We badly missed Reo Hatate in the middle of the park who usually dominates these games and Aaron Mooy had his worst game in a Celtic shirt today, looking completely off the pace but perhaps understandably considering he’s been out with an injury for the past month.
I thought we also missed Abada today, who is normally fantastic in these games against Rangers at Celtic Park and normally scores in them too.
However, we did have a real stand-out performance today from Canadian right-back Alistair Johnston, who was exceptional today and was quite rightly awarded the Man of the Match by Sky Sports.
Carter-Vickers also had an uncharacteristically poor performance, especially in the first half where he looked very shaky, giving the ball away and also picking up an early booking which you don’t want in this fixture especially, but thankfully, it didn’t cost him later on.
I thought Carl Starfelt beside him though was excellent today. He absolutely bullied Morelos and constantly out-paced him to loose balls.
And once again, our main man up front, Kyogo took his two chances brilliantly to score our first two goals of the game and then Jota did brilliantly to latch onto a loose back pass from Souttar to put the ball past Allan McGregor from a tight angle.
In terms of their goals at the time I thought it should never have been a free-kick in the first place as it looked to me like O’Riley won the ball, and they didn’t show it again in the studio so I’m not 100% certain it should have been a free-kick. I’d need to see it again to decide either way, but Hart could do nothing to stop that free-kick from Tavernier.
Their second goal we probably should have defended better and not lost Tavernier at the back post, but I’m sure that’s something Ange will go over with the players when they do their analysis of the game.
But although we certainly weren’t at our best today, we proved we don’t need to be to beat our closest rivals and still incredibly put three goals past them and go 12 points clear at the top of the league, all but ending any feint hope they had left of a title race.
Check out the class Twitter reaction from the official Celtic Twitter feed at full time today.
