Celtic have the prospect of beating RB Leipzig in the Champions League at Celtic Park tonight to help progress out of the group come January.
Brendan Rodgers and the team will be buoyed after Celtic’s win over Aberdeen and the Parkhead club’s Champions League draw at Atalanta but it seems that the German side will offer a somewhat different challenge for the Hoops boss tonight.
For Rodgers, he has Celtic playing an aggressive and structured counter-attacking style that is blowing away the rest of Scottish football.
But it seems that although Leipzig are currently second in the Bundesliga, it’s not because of the precise football they play.
‘Tricky’ RB Leipzig ‘flip-flop’ to wins ahead of Celtic clash
The brilliant Alan Morrison of stat site Celtic by Numbers delivered a breakdown of how the Bundesliga side are likely to set up against the Hoops.
And it seems that whilst they are the second-best team in Germany, it’s not what Celtic fans would think.
Morrison told The Huddlebreakdown, “Yeah, it’s tricky because they’ve actually had quite a tricky team to pin down.
“Earlier in the season, they were often getting towards 70% possession against some of the lesser teams in the Bundesliga, St. Pauli, Augsburg, Bochum, for example.
“But if you look at the last five games, they’re averaging 45% possession, and have had less than 50% possession in all those games.
“That’s included games against Mainz, Freiburg and St. Pauli again, as well as tricky games against Liverpool and Dortmund.
“They’re a really quite difficult team to predict in that sense, in terms of how possession dominant they will attempt to be. They’ve also flip-flopped between 4-4-2, which seems to be their default, and then a 3-4-2-1 or a 3-4-3, which they seem to have used in some of the tricky games, or they did do.”
‘Chaotic’ RB Leipzig can be beaten by Celtic
Whilst Leipzig is flying high in the Bundesliga, they don’t seem to be the most organised of teams as Morrison points out how ‘chaotic’ the German side is.
Morrison continued, “They played that formation away at Leverkusen and pulled off a 3-2 win at Leverkusen with 38% possession and losing the XG battle 1.14 to 2.23.
“So, didn’t see the game, but that suggested a bit of a smash-and-grab there. So, not sure what you’re going to get.
“I watched the game against Dortmund. It was what I’d call a typical Bundesliga game. It was an absolute mess.
“It was just a chaotic, unstructured game of football. They didn’t press particularly aggressively, I have to say. They did press, but it was a bit half-ar-ed.
“And the one thing that struck me was… So, the two forwards, although James says they don’t put a lot of width in the game, the two forwards will go everywhere. Openda, especially, will go either side.
“He’ll play as a winger. He’ll go through the middle. They just wander.”
So it seems that if Rodgers can stick to his game plan and every Celtic player plays their part, another three Champions League points at Celtic Park could be on the cards tonight.