Dundee Utd 0 xG 0.33 Celtic 2 xG 2.12 (Jota 51 and Mooy PEN 56) Usually most of Celtic's attacks come down the left hand side with the average for the season being 40% left and 34% right and with 14 out of 22 games the left being more dominant. Out of the 8 games more dominant down the right Greg Taylor only played the full 90 minutes in 3 of them (two against Motherwelll and one against Aberdeen).
This was not Taylor's best game for Celtic as he lost 8 duels (the most of any player) and had a passing accuracy of 84%. Bernabei had a better accuracy than that in his 3 recent outings and Johnston's lowest (excluding the Rangers game) has been 90% and it was still more for the Rangers game at 85%.
Johnston had 102 passes in this game and that was 13% of the team's total which is well above the average of 10.8% for right backs. His 102 was the 2nd highest for any right back this season with only Ralston's 113 at Pittodrie higher. Carter-Vickers had 136 passes and that's the most any right sided centre back has had this season and at 17.3% of the team's passing it was the highest % of the season and well above the average of 12.9%.
So with Johnston and Carter-Vickers being more prominent for passes it can explain why more attacks were coming down the right hand side.
Heatmaps are below for Johnston and Taylor with Johnston at the top and Taylor at the bottom. You can see Taylor far more inverted and with Taylor not at his best and Johnston not inverting enough this may have been one of the reasons Celtic were not at their best in the first half. Celtic's first half xG of 0.67 was well down on their season average of 1.10.
Celtic's most xG came in the 3rd quarter of the match which was mainly down to the penalty.
Top for xG was Mooy on 0.92 (includes penalty at 0.76), Maeda on 0.82, Kyogo on 0.48 and Jota on 0.44
Top creators were Oh on 0.32, Johnston 0.31 and Jota on 0.21.
Celtic lined up with;
Hart
Johnston, Carter-Vickers, Starfelt and Taylor
Mooy, McGregor and Hatate
Abada, Kyogo and Jota
3 changes from the Morton cup game with
Carter-Vickers and Taylor coming back from injury and Hatate coming back in. Oh also came into the squad after signing a few days ago.
Bernabei, Lawal and Welsh dropped out of the squad to make way for Carter-Vickers, Taylor and Oh.
O'Riley, Turnbull, Maeda, Haksabanovic and Oh all came on as subs for Mooy, Hatate, Jota, Abada and Kyogo.
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