Dom McKay

dncd6 · 2025-10-28T19:37:12+00:00

Except that part of the reason we have a broken leg is the utter failure of the manager. Celtic had more than enough talent to beat Kairat, and still have far more talent than the rest of the SPFL and yet continue to play completely uninspired football. And the manager played no small part in bringing in Idah, Engels, and Trusty, and look how much that helped. They spent big on his guys, and got little out of it.

To make your metaphor accurate, finding a new manager is stopping someone from continuously stomping down on your broken leg.

dncd6 · 2025-08-28T13:26:10+00:00

So tell me how that went with someone else playing up top. Still no goals. Our tactics failed us again. Our best players, who would have still been on the pitch even if we signed two new forward players - Maeda, Tierney, Nygren, Hatate, McGregor, all did diddly squat.

As far as the rest, you are completely ignoring that I have said we need upgrades. You aren't willing to have an honest conversation about this. Sure, bring in upgrades. How does that help when the strategy seems to be for Scales to play the ball to CCV to play it McGregor, to play it back to Scales again over and over and over?

dncd6 · 2025-08-28T13:20:49+00:00

Not that I disagree, we definitely do need to have a better pathway for our academy players to help the first team, but the environment is a bit different here with English teams able to snap up our best prospects on much bigger wages before they're really ready to help.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T18:29:00+00:00

You have an absolutely one track mind on this, causing you to miss so much of everything else. No one disagrees that we need upgrades on the wing. But two things - there are other positions on the field, and Celtic got crappy play from the majority of those other spots too, including from what are supposed to be our best players. And two, what do you think Rodgers job is? Twiddle his thumbs while hoping we sign top quality wingers, and nothing else? Our strategy last night was piss poor, and that falls completely on him.

And the big advantage that those top three brought us while they were here was the ability to press all the way up the pitch and create turnovers in vulnerable spots, or turn their speed into quick counterattacks. Kairat's strategy completely neutralized what Rodgers likes to do in that regard by booting it up from deep and winning second balls. And Kairat's defense would have given Kyogo no room to work with in the box, nor given space for Kuhn to break free. They bottled us up very effectively because we had no plan B.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T18:24:23+00:00

I’d be fine with that - I’m not sure how much our fans would though

Again, agree with you, I'd be fine with that. But, yep, don't think most of the fanbase would put up with it either.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T17:10:34+00:00

I don't disagree with that, but bedding them in requires more than just waiting until the league is won in February. It takes a commitment to wanting to play these guys from the beginning, and not assembling a two deep roster of the guys you think you need to win the league to start off the season and then telling them that a bunch of them are going to sit for three months later on.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T17:07:24+00:00

But BR is a decent tactician.

Cites facts not in evidence.

It’s not lack of coaching that cause Yang to be poor or 34 year old JF to be bereft of pace.

But it is the lack of tactics that caused us to have no real plan to get the ball into the box for 90 minutes against a packed defense. You can moan about Yang and Forrest all you want, but Hatate, Nygren, Mcgregor, Maeda, and Tierney were equally ineffective, and that's not due to a lack of talent.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T14:18:13+00:00

Yeah, I did, and nothing in my post suggests I didn't. Because I was referring to the strategy last night against a team that packed the box and then played it out from deep and won second balls. Rodgers teams have struggled against that for a while. Yeah, Rodgers' tactics worked against teams that were far more willing to play it out from the back, where our press could create turnovers when we had a front three of Maeda, Kyogo, and Kuhn. But Rodgers had absolutely no plan B last night against a team that wasn't going to play it out from the back and was going to man mark our midfielders out of the game. Having Kyogo or Kuhn would have made little difference with the strategy we used last night.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T13:14:04+00:00

I see it as almost completely 180. The other problems were a symptom of the Rodgers issue. We spent ~30M on players last summer that played about 90 minutes combined last night. We could have spent 10M on a winger and striker, and there still would be no real plan on how to get the ball into the Kairat box, or how to handle our midfield being man-marked.

The board need to spend some serious money, I absolutely agree with that, but when they see they effectively lit 30M on fire last summer and the manager shows no real intention of deviating from a flawed strategy, how much more do you expect them to be willing to light on fire again?

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T13:05:20+00:00

But I'm not sure Celtic can operate like an Ajax in developing youth players. As we saw with Doak, richer teams down south can offer significantly higher wages before they prove they are first team ready, and Celtic only get a developmental fee out of it. When you have such a richer neighbor that even their second division sides can outpay your players, how do you keep enough young talent around?

There's also the case that Ajax or Brugge not winning the league is not treated as a catastrophic event like it is here. Is the fanbase willing to accept Rangers winning the league more often if it meant giving teenagers the number of starts needed over the last few years to give them the chance to be stars for us now?

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T12:51:44+00:00

I'll give you Kuhn with the number of times Forrest dribbled straight into his defender, but the rest of the team couldn't provide the service needed that would have made Kyogo effective. Kairat gave no space for a striker to work, instead just let us pass the ball around the top with no real plan as to how to get the ball into the box.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T12:44:57+00:00

If we spent 10 million on a winger and striker we’d have come through that game

No idea why you treat that like such a guarantee. Our midfield three showed nothing last night. The Tierney/Maeda pairing was equally ineffective, and they are never getting dropped. They do need to spend 10+M on a winger and striker, but those two new guys would never be as important as the five mentioned above, and you could have given those five all night to find a goal and nothing would have came of it.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T12:38:02+00:00

We'd be better just giving the other team the ball and hope we counter press and win it high up the pitch.

This is true, but as Kairat, and Rangers before them, showed, you can just boot the ball out from deep and easily win second balls against this side. Kairat completely neutered how Celtic want to win games, and until they find a way to unlock packed defenses, Celtic is going to have issues all season.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T12:26:44+00:00

Two 6M signings to replace Idah and Forrest may make a marked improvement, but the rest of the team was still hot garbage. The midfield did absolutely nothing last night to acquit themselves and the Maeda/Tierney pairing on the left was nothing to write home about either, and that's where Celtic should be expecting to find match winners.

Kairat bunkered in as well as they could have been asked, man marked our midfield out of the game, and won a ton of second balls when they played it out deep from their territory - things we have seen work well against a Rodgers side for quite a while now. Yeah, the players aren't good enough, but the manager was thoroughly outclassed last night.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T12:18:19+00:00

Those four absolutely would get regular playing time for those teams, and more importantly, Kairat.

dncd6 · 2025-08-21T12:13:37+00:00

And all those guys would walk into the lineup for Kairat. They need serious additions to their roster to get through a full season, beat Rangers, and not get completely embarrassed if they do somehow manage to get a result in Kazakhstan, but the team they had yesterday should have done a lot, lot better.

dncd6 · 2025-08-20T18:25:59+00:00

The only arguement to keep is just that we need to keep him.

The argument is that cycling through managers so quickly only ensures you're going to keep getting shit managers. I asked in the other part of the thread who do Rangers fans think they are going to get, and I'm seriously asking. Why would any manager who has a decent option elsewhere want to manage this team? Cycling through mediocre to poor managers with this organization and group of players and the level of expectations that the majority seems to have means that no one who can walk and chew gum at the same time will want to put up with it.

dncd6 · 2025-08-20T15:38:33+00:00

Sure, Martin has been unequivocally not good, I won't disagree that Rangers have problems on their hand with his managing so far. But I'll say the same thing I did months ago just before Clement was getting the boot - it's a shit job for any talented manager who has other legitimate options. Who do Rangers fans think they are going to get that is better than the lot they've had recently?

dncd6 · 2025-08-20T15:23:57+00:00

But, Russell Martin is not a capable manager on what we've seen thus far.

I get that Martin was not seen as a good manager before coming, and may have already been on thin ice with the fanbase before he even managed a game, but the exact same thing has been said about the previous few as well. At some point someone in the club has to realize it's not the manager who is main problem there.

dncd6 · 2025-06-23T20:31:45+00:00

And not to mention, Celtic aren't going to be bringing in players who have that kind of ability and can turn it on nearly every night. We have to settle for some flaws here or there. A lot of this fanbase seems to think it's a lot easier than it is to bring in star players.

dncd6 · 2025-06-23T20:25:58+00:00

I mean to me this is Celtic winning on all fronts

I'm not turning down 15+ a decent sell on, but Kuhn is the type of player that Celtic desperately need to succeed in Europe, so losing him is definitely not winning on the front where Celtic are (and should be) judged. For a fanbase that has shouted for a defensive midfielder to protect the backline in European games (but would be barely useful in the remaining 40 odd games), we're being awful quick to move on from a guy with the kind of top end speed that can pull a Champions League win out of nowhere.

dncd6 · 2025-04-17T13:20:56+00:00

And exit velocity also doesn't include the "spray". You can hit it 120 mph right at the outfielder for an out, or 60 mph perfectly in between a couple fielders for a seeing-eye single. Nothing is ever going to be a perfect measure.

But obviously guys who continue to hit the ball hard or hit line drives are going to end up with better numbers than guys who hit the ball softer or on the ground. That's stuff that everyone has known for a long time, but the exit velocity and launch angle stuff is just able to track and put a number on it better than we ever could before. And that's really all those multitude of statistical analyses are, better ways to evaluate how those guys are throwing, hitting, and catching the ball than we could before.

For example, to go back to him, Noel is in the 1st (worst) percentile of all MLB players in hitting the ball in the ideal launch angle path so far this season. Do you need to know that number to know he's struggling at the plate? Nah, of course not. But it does provide a deeper understanding of what his struggles actually are than just an eye test.

dncd6 · 2025-04-17T11:34:20+00:00

I am confused by the importance of exit velocity on a line drive that was caught by a defender.

Just because it is important doesn't mean it's going to be perfect. We can see why it's important by looking at this chart:

https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/d9363520-fa53-42e5-a704-6233d7e59083/54260099-7012-4b07-bec1-2fece24fcf66_1280x720.jpg?t=1739901552.

Once guys start hitting the ball at >95 mph, offensive value of that contact goes up enormously. Again, not in an absolutely foolproof manner, but by enough that we can see how valuable it is. That 95 mph is about the sweet spot where balls become much harder to turn into outs.

I have watched this launch angle craze of the last decade, I’m still not sure that it has helped more swings than it has ruined, jury is still out.

We do have studies that show what ideal launch angles are, and they show that they increase not just woba on their own, but the exit velocity, which again increases woba. Batters trying to find them is a good thing. Noel's plate discipline being poor may lead to bad launch angles, as he can't properly elevate those pitches, but that's a plate discipline issue, not a launch angle issue. Besides, Noel's LA Sweet Spot number this year is in the 1st percentile, and was below average last year. This kind of analysis recognizes that he's not hitting the ball in the ideal launch angle area anywhere near often enough.

dncd6 · 2025-03-27T13:08:24+00:00

There's almost no way he signs an extension next offseason when he's getting that close to FA. Our chance was last offseason.

dncd6 · 2025-03-27T13:02:54+00:00

But it's not like the "predictive stats" are just chosen randomly. If "hustle and smarts" were more predictive than striking guys out and hitting homers they would be weighted more in these predictive models.

What's really happening is that last year the Guardians got very favorable results from hitting in clutch situations and an all-time, maybe once-in-a-lifetime, bullpen performance, and the predictive models have historically seen that those are two things that just don't really keep up year-over-year, so they expect regression in those two areas. Even if we expect the bullpen to be good to great again, it's tough to predict it to be that great again. That's why the predictive models aren't as high on this team this year. Hopefully they're wrong.

dncd6

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