New Celts boss Tony Mowbray and his most expensive signing to date, Marco Fortune, have already felt the negative vibes emanating from the Laptop Loyal only one competitive game into the new season. Questions have already been asked about the manager's wisdom in spending £3.8m on a player who hasn't scored yet - a player who has completed one hour of competitive football for his new team! But win or lose in Russia tonight the Celtic boss won't let the agenda-driven media deflect him from his long term plans for the club.
Overcoming Dinamo Moscow's 1-0 lead in tonight's Champions League qualifier at the Khimki Arena is the immediate objective for Mowbray. The boss knows that his side were capable of beating Dinamo last week at Celtic Park and he sees no reason why they can't reproduce that display in Russia. "I genuinely believe we will have opportunities tomorrow to win," he said yesterday. "Apart from the first ten minutes we dominated the match in Glasgow and nothing suggests we can't do exactly the same over here. We will have enough of the ball, it's just a question of what we do with it. Last Wednesday in Glasgow we had enough chances to win the game, but we didn't take them."
"I'm a no-excuse coach," said Mowbray. "This is my team. This is what I'll get judged on. I'm not in a position to say, 'this is not my team' or 'this is not my pre-season'. It might not be the programme I'd have fitted in around our Champions League games, but this is what we deal with. We get on with it.
"I could have done things slightly differently in the past few weeks." he continued. "But I needed to get every player some game-time on the pitch. You've got to try to balance it all. We will try to win this game and if we do everyone will be content. But if we lose, then in my own mind we just move on to the next game. As a coach you've got to have a bigger picture, you can't just live game to game. I'm trying to build something here but we're being judged, in effect, when we're still in our pre-season."
The manager was non-committal when asked if Scott Brown would play but reading between the lines it seems likely that Brown will find himself on the bench at the start of the game. "It was important for me to see Scott on the pitch against Sunderland on Saturday," said the manager. "He came through that game with no adverse effect, which was a positive. But I will temper that by saying that it was his first hour of football in nine or ten weeks, so tell me a footballer who can find his touch after that amount of time out?"
"I've got a responsibility to look after Scott's career as well." he said "He is not Superman. It is my call whether he is physically and mentally ready for this game. Scott has also been called up today by Scotland, and he's got a massive game coming up next Wednesday (versus Norway) so I think I need to take care with him."