Celtic manager Ange Postecoglou was not best pleased with his squad as he denied Cameron Carter-Vickers' absence had a say in their draw with St Mirren - stating his side had 'gone off it'.
A lacklustre performance allowed St Mirren to secure an unlikely but very much deserved point on Saturday. The Buddies led twice, but saw their lead cancelled out by Kyogo Furuhahsi and a late Callum McGregor strike as they battled valiantly to a draw in the east end of Glasgow. Despite the title already being wrapped up for the Celtic, fans will be disappointed with the manner of the draw and the performance that came with it.
It makes no difference to the league table in Celtic's mind, but that is twice in the past few weeks that they have dropped points at home to a team battling in and around the mid-table places. And Postecoglou backed his players to come back, adding that Cameron Carter-Vickers' absence wasn't the reason.
He said: "It was a tough game. St Mirren worked hard and that’s why they are where they are. We never really got to grips with the game, it was a bit of a struggle all the way through for us.
"It’s fair to say we’ve gone off it a little bit in the last couple of weeks, particularly in the defensive side of the game. When you do that it’s very hard to play the football we want to.
“It’s not one player, it’s got nothing to do with Cameron Carter-Vickers. We’ve missed him before, we played Champions League football without Carter-Vickers. That’s the easy thing to look at. That’s not how we view things.
"We’re not working as hard off the ball as we were prior to winning the title. And when you don’t that’s what happens. You can’t dominate games of football like we did.
“We pride ourselves on being relentless and you can’t just be relentless when you have the ball. For us, it’s actually more important we are when we don’t have it – and we haven’t been relentless the last few weeks. It’s natural, but we’ve still got games to play.
"If that’s your attitude going in it’ll be a struggle. The whole premise of what we do is not to be reactive to circumstances, but to be consistent in what we do.”
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