Times Talker: Was John Collins right to say that Celtic shouldn't abandon attacking principles in Europe?

JOHN COLLINS claims with some justification that is a Celtic tradition to play attacking football all the time.

Tradition is important. So is progress in Europe. It has become traditional for Celtic to leak goals left, right and centre in almost every European tie, because it is the Celtic way to attack, attack, attack. Apparently.

What a lot of nonsense.

You can go back to the 1970s when Jock Stein was in charge and even then keeping out Johnny Foreigner proved to be a difficult task – and this was the club’s greatest side.

Those fans who were around in the 1980s will recall their team going toe-to-toe against some seriously good opponents, until said opposition went close to their box and then the Celtic defence, or lack of it, saw them go out of whatever competition they were in with a whimper.

We shall ignore the 1990s, when it was awful from front to back, and skip to Martin O’Neill’s time when scoring was easy, but a failure to keep clean sheets did that team out of qualifying out the group stages of the Champions League at least twice.

And here Celtic find themselves in 2015 playing an expansive and open game which has allowed Malmo, Fenerbahce, Ajax and Molde all to score at least two goals against them.

Yet Collins says the way the team is set-up will never change. What?

Apart from the four or five elite teams, everyone changes their style in Europe, especially away from home. Are Celtic above this? Erm, they are not.

Celtic need to tighten up at the back and in midfield. If that offends Collins’ sensibilities then so be it. Celtic need to start doing better or they will become, at best, also-rans in Europe.

Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson used to flood the midfield and play a different game in order to get through to the next round. If it’s good enough for Fergie then it’s good enough for Ronny Deila and his assistant.

Collins is wrong. His team are not a leading light for playing attractive football not matter what. They are failing in the Europa League, which should not be that big a step-up, because they are naive.

And while he claimed it would be boring to watch a 4-5-1 with the team playing for a draw, watching Celtic ship five goals to a mid-table Norwegian team is hardly thrilling.

No, Celtic need to tighten up says Graeme McGarry

The Celtic way. It's something you hear people speak about in reverent tones when discussing the great Celtic teams of the past, and of course Hoops fans should be rightly proud of the accomplishments of teams such as the Lisbon Lions who won the European Cup by playing a brave brand of attacking football.

The trouble is, it's not 1967 anymore, and where once there stood Billy McNeil and Jinky Johnstone, there now is Efe Ambrose and James Forrest. No disrespect to either player from the modern era, but if Celtic are to go for an all-out attacking approach, then the former is not well enough equipped to act as an insurance policy when Celtic lose the ball, and the latter hasn't shown enough to suggest he can open up defences in European football with the kind of regularity that would compensate for losing a shedload of goals at the other end.

Neil Lennon achieved qualification for the last 16 of the Champions League with a Celtic side built upon a solid foundation. You perhaps didn't always know where the goals were coming from, but you knew that they wouldn't be gift-wrapping any goals down the other end either.

Celtic have scored in every game of their Europa League group campaign so far, but they have also conceded 9 goals in those 4 games. There is no doubt that the loss of Virgil van Dijk and Jason Denayer has contributed to their defensive fragility, and the replacements that have been brought in have so far failed to cut the mustard.

If Celtic are to have any chance of qualifying, Ronny Deila must offer some protection to that porous central defence, and that means compromising on his laudible, yet naive, approach.