Matt O'Riley says St Johnstone will set up to stop Celtic rather than have any designs on taking three points.
The Hoops have won 16 of their 17 league games this season and face the Perthshire Saints at Parkhead on Christmas Eve. Aberdeen have faced criticism for how deep they defended at Pittodrie in a 1-0 loss to Ange Postecoglou's men last weekend while Livingston also presented them with a low block in Wednesday's 2-1 win for the champions.
O'Riley anticipates Callum Davidson's Saints as another hard team to break down and that their goal may be just to stop the ruthless impact Angeball can have. But sticking to their principles is what will get Celtic through according to the midfielder: "They’re hard to beat like most teams in this league, they set up in a certain way to stop us rather than winning the game in my opinion. It makes it difficult that they will have a lot of men behind the ball so our ball speed and circulation needs to be high and that should help us.
“We know what we need to do and you saw against Aberdeen how extreme it was with nine men behind their box, but we won that game so we proved we can break teams down. Everyone knows where they need to be, the structure is very clear and we’ve worked on it a lot every day in training so there’s no real excuse for being in the wrong position that goes for all of us."
