John Collins laughs off De Boer’s claims Celtic parked two buses

In the aftermath of last night’s 2-2 draw, Ajax manager Frank De Boer claimed Celtic “parked two buses” to keep out the Dutch champions.

However, a lot of people would see it as a sensible tactical approach rather than the game being a cricket score to be compact and counter-attack, especially away from home.

Assistant manager John Collins spoke to the media earlier today at Lennoxtown as reported by STV.

We didn’t do what he wanted so he describes it as parking the bus, but I thought there were periods of the game we opened up and we kept the ball very well.

That’s the way he wants to describe it, we’ll describe it as defensively we were excellent. We were compact.

Obviously he would want us to be open to allow space for his good players to have easy movement and easy passes.

Celtic opened the scoring through Nir Bitton before Victor Fischer finished off a fantastic piece of football from Ajax. Celtic retook the lead before half-time and set out in the second half to defend what they had.

We created chances, you don’t create chances if you park the bus for 90 minutes.

Celtic held on in the closing stages for a well-earned draw and can take confidence from the result in the Amsterdam ArenA. Izaguirre’s red card could have proved to be the difference in Celtic holding on for one or all three points. Nevertheless, the result was what most fans would happily have taken prior to kick-off.

The Hoops are in action again this Sunday against Dundee at Celtic Park.