Houston, We Still Have Problem...

in Celtic's midfield...

While my normal publishing schedule will be Monday’s, subscribers will have to endure columns that emerge organically as the urge strikes my fancy - as I conducted my usual post-game routine in preparation for recording the Extra Time show, just such an urge descended upon me.

Both Alan and I wrote and spoke quite a bit about the midfield heading into the Hearts and Club Brugge games, and I wanted to address some related nuance from Wednesday’s game. Similar to post-Hearts, I am seeing a lot of criticism of Engels vs glorifying of Bernardo. The context of each’s utilization Wednesday was important, in my opinion.

Similar to the Hearts game, the introduction of Bernardo appeared to overlap materially with a shift in game state and also how Reo Hatate was deployed.

For this column, I used the same Wyscout event maps for all the players.

First up was total actions from Hatate - unfortunately I do not have access by half:

We can see it is kind of all over the place, and that is symptomatic of the dynamic nature of our midfield interplay/movement, but also the shift in his role. As has generally been customary in Europe, he was initially at the top of our 4-4-2 defensive and pressing structure along with Kyogo Furuhashi. He was also more forward during that stretch, and often times populated areas that were pseudo-10 in nature. Note all of the failed actions high up the pitch.

Next up was duels only:

Now passes received:

After the substitution, Hatate was more central and also dropping deep to assist in buildup - again partially similar to the adjustment made at halftime vs Hearts.

Now let us look at the same maps for Engels with the same sequential order:

We can see that his involvement was generally pretty deep, as Brugge were more in control of the game during the first half. Possession was about 50-50 in the first half, where as it skewed closer to 70-30 in our favor during the second - a material shift in game state, as Brugge appeared to settle in to defend their lead and counter attack.