How are Celtic considered to be in a 50/50 tussle for a Champions League place against a side whose biggest outlay on a player this summer was £1.5 million??

This morning, the Daily Record put six of their writers on the spot and asked them to call the LASK tie.

Two-one, three-one, one-nil, two-one, one-one, two-one.

Not one of them could bring himself to call it comfortable.

One of them couldn’t even give us the win.

And I’m not particularly interested in arguing with any of them, because in fairness to the lot of them, they’re only reading the room.

The room says this is tight.

The room says nervy.

In fact, the room says a Champions League place, and everything that comes with it, is sitting on a coin toss.

What I am interested in is the question none of them thought to ask themselves while they were typing.

How are we in a 50/50 tussle with this side at all?

Because here is the number that should have been the story…

LASK’s biggest outlay on a player this summer was £1.5 million.

One and a half million pounds.

That is their marquee signing, their statement of intent, their big summer move.

Their record signing of all time, Marin Ljubičić, cost them £2.5 million.

That is the ceiling of the market these people shop in.

Now compare and contrast that with what we’ve spent in this window.

Michael Gannon put our outlay at £30 million at the weekend.

Thirty million against one and a half million.

And that’s before you get anywhere near what we are actually capable of spending, sitting on the kind of cash reserves most clubs in Europe can only dream about

So on paper, this shouldn’t be close.

On paper, this should be a formality.

Twenty times their transfer spend, a stadium of 60,000 behind us, and a squad the Record are telling us has firepower to burn.

And yet the same men who point that out then hand us a 2-1 and call it nerve-shredding.

So how does a club spending £30 million end up level pegging with a club spending £1.5 million?

I wrote about exactly that last night, and nothing has happened since to change a word of it.

We sold Arne Engels and replaced him with nobody.

We allowed Paolo Bernardo to leave a midfield that was already threadbare before he walked out the door.

And somewhere in amongst all that, a club run by a leading sports lawyer managed not to notice that Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain was carrying a three match European ban from 2023.

So we go into tonight with Callum McGregor, Benjamin Nygren, Mika Baur, Luke McCowan and Reo Hatate.

Five midfielders.

Five.

Against the Austrian champions, in a two legged tie worth the guts of £40 million.

This is a 50/50 tie for one reason and one reason only, and it isn’t LASK’s recruitment department – it’s ours

Michael Nicholson made this a 50/50 tie.

The board made this a 50/50 tie.

They took a squad that should have been strolling through this and they hollowed out the one area of the pitch that decides two legged European football.

Ryan McDonald at the Record put his finger on it without quite following it home.

He flagged our lack of physicality in midfield since Engels left, then predicted 3-1 anyway.

Graeme Young said we’d miss Engels’ athleticism, then went for a draw.

They can see the hole.

They just can’t bring themselves to say out loud whose hole it is.

Right, that’s the money and the mismanagement dealt with.

Now the football, because there’s a second thing about this tie that’s bothering me and it hasn’t had nearly enough attention.

LASK line up in a 3-4-1-2.

A back three, two wing-backs, two central midfielders, an attacking midfielder in the hole, and – this is the bit – two strikers up front.

Not one, two.

But here’s the thing, this seems to be predominantly their away formation set up.

I also have to admire the willingness of their manager, Dietmar Kühbauer, to deploy two tactical formations.

At home they tend to play with a 4-4-2 formation, so it’s clear why they do this when they’re away.

A side that sets up with two strikers and a ten behind them is not sitting in to survive, it’s sitting in to hurt you on the break

That shape is not an accident.

That shape is a plan.

It says they’ll let us have the ball, sit compact through the middle with three centre backs and a double pivot, and wait for the moment we commit bodies forward.

Then it’s one pass into the ten, and two strikers running at whatever we’ve left behind.

And we will leave something behind.

We always do, because that’s how Martin O’Neill wants us to play at Celtic Park and rightly so.

Our full-backs will be high, our midfield will be pushed up, and with five available midfielders there isn’t a lot of insurance sitting in front of the back four when the ball turns over.

The two dangermen are Samuel Adeniran and Moses Usor. Twenty-three goals between them last season.

They will not see much of the ball tonight.

They won’t need to.

They’ll need three or four moments across 180 minutes, and a side that has scored sixteen in four games this season is more than capable of taking them.

So by all means enjoy the noise and the lights and a proper European night at Celtic Park, because we’ve earned one after the Stuttgart shambles.

Just don’t mistake territory for control.

Win the game, win it well, and win it by enough that Linz next Tuesday is a formality rather than an ordeal.

Because if it isn’t, we all know exactly who put us there.

And it wasn’t the club who spent £1.5 million…

Choose Read Celtic as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.