Celtic's Ange Postecoglou dishes out barbs after his team's Rangers battering: 'Maybe if I was German, Dutch or Spanish, people might look at me differently'

Celtic’s Ange Postecoglou was in the mood to dish out the barbs after his team handed out a 4-0 battering to rivals Rangers.

A thunderous win that has set up his team to play their high pressing, high energy game against Real Madrid in Tuesday night’s Champions League opener.

Clearly irked as he had not let on pre-match by comments from Barry Ferguson that Giovanni van Bronckhorst had him “sussed” because the 57-year-old only had Plan A while the Dutchman had Plans A to D, Postecoglou had a jab when it was put to him he had earned the right to deploy his attacking approach against the Champions League holders.

“What a great opportunity to play our football,” he said of the encounter in which, he offered up smiling, his team would “be tested”. “If we’re not successful, fair enough. But let’s go down swinging rather than deferring to someone because they’re a good team. Our supporters want us to take the game to Real Madrid and see where it takes us. Let’s have a crack anyway. Maybe if I was German, Dutch or Spanish, people might look at me differently as a manager in terms of tactics. Apparently I’ve got one simple approach, a plan A. But we’ll just stick to that.”

Celtic manager Ange Postecoglou larges it with the club's support following his team's flailing of Rangers. (Photo by Craig Williamson / SNS Group)

Postecoglou had early taken issue with the notion that the derby was his team’s first real challenge of a faultless six-game season. “People have been dismissive because they thought the opposition we’ve had so far weren’t up to it. We were brilliant last week [in the 9-0 at Tannadice] but people spoke about how poor Dundee United were.That suits us because it ignores our part in it. It will be the same today. We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing. A five point [lead] doesn’t get you anything right now - that was shown last year. But if we keep improving and playing like that? We’ll be hard to stop. We were ready for this game but it was a step up in intensity levels. Rangers are a good team, no-one has said they aren’t.

"They’re in the Champions League and beat good teams to get there.But we were ready for them. People have said this is our first real test but we’ve played good football to be ready for this. Now we’ll get ready for Tuesday night. They [Mardrid] are an unbelievable team with outstanding pedigree. They’re champions of Europe but we’ll go out there and test ourselves. There’s no reason why we can’t play with that intensity and trouble Real. We don’t need motivation to raise our game. If you go to Ross County and score four [as we did in the Premier Sports Cup win in midweek], you need to be motivated or you slip up. To score nine last week and break a record, you need to be motivated. We were motivated today and we’ll be motivated on Tuesday night. We don’t need to change our approach to measure ourselves against the best.”

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