Livi v Celtic

Well, might as well get this thread going…

Can we build on a good point from Castle Greyskull? I can’t see it myself, they have broken their plastic duck and I expect it to be a much more common thing now. Another point would be outstanding.

Celtic have been making and missing dozens of chances recently. It's all going to click for them in a game soon. I'm hoping it won't be on Sunday. They are a different beast to Rangers. I'd bite your hand off for a draw or even a respectable defeat.

Same again i'd think, Nouble as our out ball and a more defensive set up than usual, prob foregoing wingers for defensive midfielder, trying to keep it tight defending our box, and Scotty P & St Kelly as our attacking mids supporting Nouble when possible.

I know we let Sevco play down the flanks and showed them wide not allowing Kent and Arfield to cut inside and have pot shots at our goal, instead forcing them into putting crosses into our box, and Celtic are a completely different outfit that like to play it more on the deck with quick short passes trying to thread it through our defenders in the box, but it's much the same game plan defending it, packing the box and not allowing them the space to shoot at our goal. We'll need to be sharp and not make any clumsy tackles in the box though.

Oh and Collum is the ref for this so that should be fun.

I'm pretty optimistic of us getting a draw here, and maybe even nicking a win, mon the Livi Lions, lets pump this mob and restore the natural order of being their bogey team.

Oh…and bring back the black shorts, you know it makes sense!

As last week I'll be more interested in todays results. Boys did brilliant at Ibrox.Tommorow will be a different proposition imo.Admitedly they don't like coming here but their offensive threat gives me the fear for this one.Once again weve nothing to lose and so much to gain however unlikely. Suspect they'll put someone on big Joel from the start and that being the case we'll need someone up front with him should he break away,God knows who.Possibly one of the Mids.Ive an idea of our starting 11 but will wait and see.Jota back for them is a massive bonus for them.Cracking player who is lethal when on his game.Anyways,another free hit for us.More important games to come once this is out off the way.They couldn't do it again,could they?.Mon the Lions. .

Right then.After perusing today's results here goes.The Huns skelping the sheep makes tomorrow all the more difficult for us.Celtic will want to establish their 4 point lead at the top.A win for Livi would see us back in the top six.On the other hand weve a 7 point gap between ourselves and 11th place.Its all so tight.2 games in hand on those directly above us,albeit Celtic being one and I think Aberdeen the other.Would bite your arm off for 4 points from those 2 games.Regardless my prediction start of the season,ie 8th is looking promising, but further progression would be more than welcome.Mon the Lions,do it..

Just to edit.St Johnstone getting back to back wins against Hibs and Killie shows us cant take for granted anything.Theve been our nemesis the last few years and always seem to pull results out of the bag.The warning is there from the Fermers.

Troy wrote:Right then.After perusing today's results here goes.The Huns skelping the sheep makes tomorrow all the more difficult for us.Celtic will want to establish their 4 point lead at the top.A win for Livi would see us back in the top six.On the other hand weve a 7 point gap between ourselves and 11th place.Its all so tight.2 games in hand on those directly above us,albeit Celtic being one and I think Aberdeen the other.Would bite your arm off for 4 points from those 2 games.Regardless my prediction start of the season,ie 8th is looking promising, but further progression would be more than welcome.Mon the Lions,do it..

Our two games in hand are both against Celtic, Troy. Tomorrow's and one at Parkhead after the World Cup. It's the one postponed when the Queen died.

If only Noobs had gotten a decent connection on that early chance, thereafter, the best team in the country showed that to be true. We hung in manfully and tried but Postacoglu has his team believing they can play on plastic (which they can; they always could - it was only ever a poor excuse when they couldn’t get a result).

Their first was a good finish but they got through too easily.
The second was another good finish but we could have cleared the ball better.
The pen was one of those that annoy me as IMO it was ball to hand not hand to ball although this now seems to be irrelevant. Funny to see him miss it though.
Third, Turnbull looked well offside to me but without the benefit of a replay, he may well have timed his run perfectly, either way our defence should have played to the whistle.

Collum - allowed them to get away with shirt pulling all game and gave a foul against Noobs for his only shirt pull offence and booked Shinnie for his only shirt pull offence. Typical.

Also…two big black screens at either end of our stand, I assumed to have the message up that VAR was in use… but didn’t see anything shown on them.

Yeah seems to be perfectly acceptable to hold onto Nouble or keep hold of his shirt, must have missed it in the rule book, maybe in a subparagraph or something.

Couldn't do much about the opening goal but i felt we let ourselves down with the 2nd, Hamilton also looked like he should've had it. Yeah 3rd looked offside, also question marks on there being an offside on the build up to their 2nd, and the pen was a joke. VAR really hasn't made any difference to us getting the shitty end of the stick with dodgy ref decisions.

Plan A was pretty much goosed once we conceded in the first 9 mins, though we did well not to capitulate and go in at HT still only a goal behind. We had one or two decent moves around their box, a couple of weak shots at Hart, and quite a few set pieces into their box, but to no avail, then once the 2nd went in it was def game over. The 3rd just put the scunner on it for us, digging into our minus GD a bit more.

Ah well, put it behind us and get back to playing with wingers and a more attacking formation, away to Killie next Fri night.

Absolutely no complaints whatsoever from me.Celtic were too strong for us all over the park imo and thoughrally deserved their win.When I saw the starting 11 i suspected the worse and for me that fear was more than justified. An awful whatch from a Livi point of view and so frustrating to see our lack of offensive options costing us again.The pen award was too far away for me to see will have to force my self to watch the replay.As for those 2 big screens at either end of our stand,haven't a clue what there use is.Had heard they were for advertisement purposes only from one of the groundstaff.Dissapointing if so.Anyway we move on to Killie and hopefully get back off the ropes.

I’ve seen the replays on the SkySports app, penalty is a joke, definitely ball to hand not hand to ball, but that is what is going to happen regularly now.

3rd goal is actually onside though, Omeonga is the last man playing him on and also the first to claim offside and the last to react to the fact that you play on in such situations nowadays.

Killie on Friday is now a huge game…win that and we have a decent cushion of points, lose and we’re back in the dogfight at the bottom.

Ah well at least we have both halves of the OF out of the way while most of the rest still have them to play.
We were well beaten today and lucky that the score was not higher. Celtic have a team full of skilled football players. If you get them on a bad day it's about the only way you will take points off them. Today they were good so I won't be too critical of our team. It would have been suicide to take our usual game to them. I am not forgetting the 9 goals they put past Dundee United earlier in the season.
I am just happy that we finished the game with 11 men, no injuries and just the 3 goals from them.
Our league recommences next week. Let's hope some of our wounded are recovered.

Forgot to mention the Celtic histrionics. Why do they feel the need to go down so easy when they are clearly better than us? Fooled Willie Collum every time.
One of the commentators on an English game yesterday put it well. He said of a player who went down easy in the box - "he must have felt a butterfly brush his shoulders."

orco wrote:Forgot to mention the Celtic histrionics. Why do they feel the need to go down so easy when they are clearly better than us? Fooled Willie Collum every time.
One of the commentators on an English game yesterday put it well. He said of a player who went down easy in the box - "he must have felt a butterfly brush his shoulders."

I believe they got a foul for this one too.

https://media.giphy.com/media/qMo2NBzMTTJqqczkFG/giphy.gif

Troy wrote:Absolutely no complaints whatsoever from me.Celtic were too strong for us all over the park imo and thoughrally deserved their win.When I saw the starting 11 i suspected the worse and for me that fear was more than justified. An awful whatch from a Livi point of view and so frustrating to see our lack of offensive options costing us again.The pen award was too far away for me to see will have to force my self to watch the replay.As for those 2 big screens at either end of our stand,haven't a clue what there use is.Had heard they were for advertisement purposes only from one of the groundstaff.Dissapointing if so.Anyway we move on to Killie and hopefully get back off the ropes.

Not sure what you expected Troy, we were never going to set the team out to have a go at Celtic, with 2 wingers, or in a front 3 of Bahamboula, Nouble and Anderson. we did the same against Sevco and almost beat them, but Celtic are just too good. If we'd gone toe to toe with them we'd have been ripped apart, They are quick and direct and have goal scorers all through their team.

On VAR, Martindale wanted it, so far we've had a red card and a penalty against us that wasn't being given till a VAR review told the ref to go have a look at it. Thought the intention was to stop us getting wrong decisions against us, like the Motherwell pen and St Johnstone hand ball in their box, that's working well then.

Liviforever wrote:Yeah seems to be perfectly acceptable to hold onto Nouble or keep hold of his shirt, must have missed it in the rule book, maybe in a subparagraph or something.

Couldn't do much about the opening goal but i felt we let ourselves down with the 2nd, Hamilton also looked like he should've had it. Yeah 3rd looked offside, also question marks on there being an offside on the build up to their 2nd, and the pen was a joke. VAR really hasn't made any difference to us getting the shitty end of the stick with dodgy ref decisions.

Plan A was pretty much goosed once we conceded in the first 9 mins, though we did well not to capitulate and go in at HT still only a goal behind. We had one or two decent moves around their box, a couple of weak shots at Hart, and quite a few set pieces into their box, but to no avail, then once the 2nd went in it was def game over. The 3rd just put the scunner on it for us, digging into our minus GD a bit more.

Ah well, put it behind us and get back to playing with wingers and a more attacking formation, away to Killie next Fri night.

Just watched Sportscene, so yeah, Obileye was covering clearing the ball from an offside Celtic player, and didn't get himself back into his defensive position for their shot that went in, so def should've been given as offside for the first phase of play building up to the goal. Prob wouldn't have made any difference as we were a goal down and weren't going to score ourselves, but it's another feckup by the VAR refs not doing their jobs properly, as was the decision to award their pen.

Fitzwater leaving his man cost us the first. And hope to feck George is back for the Killie game because Hamilton didn't look great.

Liviforever wrote:

orco wrote:Forgot to mention the Celtic histrionics. Why do they feel the need to go down so easy when they are clearly better than us? Fooled Willie Collum every time.
One of the commentators on an English game yesterday put it well. He said of a player who went down easy in the box - "he must have felt a butterfly brush his shoulders."

I believe they got a foul for this one too.

https://media.giphy.com/media/qMo2NBzMTTJqqczkFG/giphy.gif

Aye I rest my case. They were all at it. I'm not a fan of players going down easy but I was actually pleased to see players like Devlin joining in. It helped to even things up a bit but sad to see football teams reduced to this kind of farcical behaviour. Even sadder that refs fall for it.

My expectations weren't high before the game if you look back L/F.The reference you've highlighted in my postmatch post was partly aimed at the gaffer.Seen him saying on multiple platforms that he was so dissapointed with the lack of offensive chances for us.Whilst I understand as you say we couldn't go gung ho against them it was down to him with his starting 11.Yeh I know we had injuries etc,but big Joel on his own for most of the game was soul destroying imo.As I said Celtic were too strong for us on the day and not even sure if were at full strength yesterday would have made much difference?.Lol.

Troy wrote:My expectations weren't high before the game if you look back L/F.The reference you've highlighted in my postmatch post was partly aimed at the gaffer.Seen him saying on multiple platforms that he was so dissapointed with the lack of offensive chances for us.Whilst I understand as you say we couldn't go gung ho against them it was down to him with his starting 11.Yeh I know we had injuries etc,but big Joel on his own for most of the game was soul destroying imo.As I said Celtic were too strong for us on the day and not even sure if were at full strength yesterday would have made much difference?.Lol.

Maybe if Shamal was in goals, and Joel had connected better with that shot right at the start from our free kick into the box to him, who knows. Latterly i'd agree with you, was wanting Anderson on up front playing off Nouble, but then they scored a 2nd (which shouldn't have been given) and it was game over. Was actually surprised he put Anderson on after that, with the way he's been protecting him, thinking why bother we've too much to do now at 2-0 down. Glad he did though, and at least gave him a run out for some game time, same with Omeonga.

Think we needed all our best and most experienced players for this, like Shamal, Omeonga, Montano, to at least have had a chance. Celtic had 20 Million pounds worth of players sitting on their bench, and McGregor was also sitting in the stands just in front of me, which shows the gulf in finances between the sides.

Yeh,finance's aside outside the bigger teams,I'm pleasantly surprised that we continue to give a good account of ourselves. As you say will be good to get back to full strength and hopefully consolidate our place in the top flight.Weve missed out on so many points lost narrowly. Just hope it doesn't bite us as the campaign goes on.‍�.