Fluid Tactics Pars Power

Crawford and Calderwood look back at Celtic Park performance.

Plenty of praise for Stevie Crawford was forthcoming from Jimmy Calderwood after the Dunfermline number nine had been asked to lead a one man attack at Celtic Park on Wednesday evening. The instruction to Crawford had been not to look on the defensive side so much. Stevie admitted that this was something he had always had in his game:-

"I maybe don’t get into so many goalscoring chances but I have never been scared to work hard for the team. Last night my job was to hold the ball up and try and hurt them in the last third of the pitch. I felt that it worked for the majority of the game although at the end of the day we didn’t get the result.

On Sunday with the whole of Scotland watching live on BBC TV it didn’t look as though Dunfermline were competing; Stevie anguished:-

"It is not nice when people say that about you because in every game you are going out to win. Last night the penalty decision at 2-1 down definitely killed the game. It was an honourable defeat last night where we played some decent stuff and gave Celtic one of their hardest games at Parkhead."

With Scott Thomson playing further forward as an attack minded midfielder and Steven Hampshire, Barry Nicholson and Jason Dair all available to get up quickly from the middle of the park Stevie felt that he was doing more of his work in the Celtic half and the last third of the pitch which of course is what you’d expect from a striker.

Jimmy Calderwood reflected on the Celtic cup replay admiring their quality of delivery at corner kicks but pointing out that for all their qualities that they have got: -

"They did not hurt us from open play until we opened up. At some stages we matched them; at the start of the second half and at 2-1; not many people have done that this season."

The self belief that comes from such performances is firmly entrenched as the opinion of his players. Barry Nicholson backed that up in a recent television interview expressing a view that he was only at East End Park a few days when he realised that he had made the right decision. Calderwood is quick to point out:-

"We are sixth top of the league and we deserve to be there. We should have had a few more points."

When Andrius Skerla and Youssef Rossi were brought to East End Park Jimmy Calderwood claimed that it was to give his team pace at the back that could cope with the Old Firm attacks yet the combination have only really been used in this way at Celtic Park last night and at Ibrox last month. Did the team manager see this as a combination to persevere with?

"It depends on the opponents how we are going to play it. I played Rossi out of position against Celtic and Agathe; it worked out very well in the first cup match but it didn’t work very well on Sunday. We have a good left back with McGroarty obviously. We did it at Dundee United but they played two wide men and that brought us some problems.

"It depends what the opposition are doing. We could put one of them sweeper but then Justin Skinner has done very well and he didn’t deserve to be out of the team on Wednesday night. It was just for tactical reasons that it was done. Luckily enough we have those kind of players who can adapt within a game.

"It is important for a club like Dunfermline that you can change the tactics in the game; that is what we are trying to get and we changed our tactics twice within the game last night."

This versatility within the squad makes the prediction of the starting line up an extremely hard job. Jimmy sees this not just a problem for the fans and pundits but for the opposing managers too:-

"I’d like to think so. The two of them together gives the options to play a flat back four or you could play those two and a sweeper. There won’t be a lot of people like playing against them. I don’t think that Henrik Larsson would like to play against Skerla and Rossi every week. You are talking about top quality strikers, top quality delivery and passes that gets you through. With all respect to Scottish football there are not that many teams that have got the both of them."