No small-time mentalities in Ange Postecoglou's Celtic setup - Kevin McKenna

Following that defeat, along with Rangers’ 4-0 humbling by Ajax, the Aberdeen manager said: “I always find it funny when managers from either side talk about financial gulfs. Welcome to the world of the other Scottish Premiership clubs.”

It was a small-time remark by a small-time manager saying to his own supporters that their club, despite a wonderful European pedigree of their own, will only ever be small-time. Goodwin, like many others, failed to acknowledge the significance of the Celtic performance against the reigning European champions.

Nor can you compare it with Rangers’ defeat in Amsterdam. There’s a reason why their supporters were dismayed by their team’s display in Holland while Celtic supporters applauded their side off the park. Goodwin knows this and so do several others in the Scottish football press.

The financial gulf between Celtic and Real Madrid, who can spend £300million on a state-of-the-art foldaway pitch, is greater than that which exists between Celtic and Aberdeen.

Yet the Hoops elected to adopt a fast-moving, one-touch, high-energy strategy against Real. Nor was this a cavalier, devil-may-care approach. It’s taken 14 months of painstaking rebuilding and a complete overhaul in tactics, fitness and game preparation to get to this stage.

Ange Postecoglou simply believes that the best way to compete with clubs in the billionaire, top-four European leagues is to try to match them in intensity and to ensure, at least, that his players are comfortable passing the ball to each other under acute pressure. 

READ MORE: Fanatical Celtic functions, awesome Paul McStay and 11,000 keepie-uppies - Stuart Slater Big Interview

For long spells in the first hour or so of the game Celtic subjected Real to the sort of examination that they rarely ever encounter. In that period they created more clear-cut chances against them than Liverpool managed to do over 90 minutes in the Champions League final in Paris in May. Effectively, they approached the match believing they might actually win it.

Compare this to Aberdeen’s approach at Parkhead on the first day of the season. Within the first five minutes of the game it became obvious that none of the Aberdeen players believed they could win.

A euphemism has emerged among Scottish managers to pre-empt any criticism in the wake of a defeat by Celtic: our seasons won’t be defined by these matches. Effectively, it tells their own supporters not to bother turning up.

If these managers really believed this they would choose to have a go and try to play against Celtic to the best of their ability. Instead, they too often emerge from the tunnel looking like a defeated team before a ball has been kicked.

They come to these games hoping that the referee will indulge an aggressive approach and spare them too many cards. That our referees too often encourage an agricultural approach to the game in Scotland is one of the reasons why, on the world stage, Scottish football is regarded as a medieval backwater that hasn’t yet discovered electricity.

You don’t get to play for a club like the Dons unless you possess a significant degree of ability. Aberdeen is one of only five proper cities in Scotland and the football club, with no competing rival, has the place to itself. This is not a small operation.  

Yet, rather than work hard to improve good players and to squeeze every ounce of their potential from them, too many clubs place limitations on them. It’s the far easier and lazier option. Competing well with Celtic requires that each player is at the peak of his physical conditioning and that a club’s good players (and there are several of these in Scotland) are playing to the full potential of their technical gifts. 

During the Martin O’Neill era I watched a very fine Hibs team participate in one of the best domestic games I’ve ever seen at Parkhead. Celtic won this game 3-2 but no supporter would have complained if Hibs had triumphed instead. They went toe-to-toe with a  team that arguably had been much more expensive to assemble than this one and which included Henrik Larsson, Chris Sutton and Neil Lennon. 

In the 1980s, Celtic supporters applauded Jim McLean’s Dundee United side from the field after they’d dismantled them in a 3-0 League Cup semi-final victory. The Hoops won the league that season and would defeat Juventus 1-0 a few months later in the European Cup.

READ MORE: Inside the night Celtic halted Johan Cruyff's mighty Ajax side to become toast of Europe

Postecoglou is going for broke with this team but not in any reckless or precipitous manner. It’s clear that he wants every one of his players – including his goalkeepers – to have control under pressure. It’s also clear that he believes they can go to any destination in the world and give a decent account of themselves. Most importantly, he’s given these players the belief that they can do this too.

The Shakhtar Donetsk manager Igor Jovicevic said he felt that this was the best Celtic side of the last 20 years. I’d go further and say that it’s the best of any era since the Lisbon Lions.

Following the 1-1 draw with Shakhtar in Warsaw, Jovicevic said: “It was a great game, very dynamic. Celtic are very dynamic, very aggressive, they move very fast and we knew that we would be facing aggressive pressing from their side.”

It's barely 14 months into the Postecoglou era. He’s only had two proper transfer windows to play with. You can discount the first one because at that time in the early weeks of his tenure he was still getting to know what he was working with.

There’s a curiously widespread belief that he’ll jump at the first decent offer from England. But if it’s not a club that has a Champions League pedigree or any expectations of getting there, I can’t see him being interested.

He feels his coaching methods and ideas belong at this level and he wants to ensure that Celtic don’t settle for merely existing there but thriving too.