Celtic put onus on Kayal to spark a revival

WITH three rounds of fixtures still to go after this one in the Europa League – and maybe more in Group I should Sion be reinstated – Celtic’s fate will not officially be sealed should they lose here tonight to Stade Rennais. With two teams to go through to the last 32, the Scots will be at most four points behind the second-placed team.

But, while the arithmetic will not be impossible, the footballing task facing them will be highly improbable. With only one point from their opening games against Atletico Madrid and Udinese, the joint leaders who meet tonight in Italy, Celtic need to impose themselves on their French opponents both tonight and in next month’s return in Glasgow. And even then they would have to find some way of conjuring up results at home to the Spaniards or in Udine.

For a team who lost three goals in the first half of their last league match, and were beaten with relative ease in the game before that at Tynecastle, there already seems little hope that they will discover the kind of form they require to reach the knockout stages. Throw in the absence through injury of players such as Kris Commons, Gary Hooper and Scott Brown, and the picture does not get any brighter for beleaguered manager Neil Lennon.

Yet, while Lennon is in dire need of reasons to be cheerful, he believes he may have found one in Beram Kayal. At his best last season the Israeli midfielder was one of Celtic’s key performers along with the three mentioned above, yet this campaign he has at best under-performed, and at worst looked completely uninterested. Now that Kayal has signed a new, improved contract, however, his manager hopes he will get back to the kind of form he enjoyed last year.

“Mentally he’s had his issues with the contract, but now it’s done and he looked a lot brighter yesterday in training,” Lennon said yesterday. “But I was hoping for a performance from him on Saturday because everything had been agreed in principle before the Kilmarnock match.

“So now he’s put pen to paper hopefully he can settle down. He’s fully committed to the club, the team and myself, so we are hoping we see the best of him now. He’s only been playing in patches recently, which you could say about the squad as a whole, really.

“He’s a player I would dearly love to keep, and now we have him on a long-term contract. He’s happy with the contract and we’re happy too. I think he’s a great player and hopefully we will see the best of him now that we’ve got him tied down until 2015.

“He’s an important player for us and he’s an emotional kid at times – there is no doubt about that, it’s part of his make-up. But now things have settled down he’ll have no more voices telling him what to do here there and everywhere. He can concentrate solely on his football now and I think that’s what he wants to do.

“I think he was getting bad advice from other areas. But what he has done now is he has listened to us – the people who really want him to succeed. He’s taken our advice on board and we feel he has done the right thing.

“He had a wonderful season last year and that laid down a marker for him. He has not lived up to that standard of performance so far this season. But there’s a long way to go until the end of the season and we expect big things from him now.”

But big things from Kayal in the middle of the park will not be enough if they are matched by outsized blunders at the back from the likes of Daniel Majstorovic. The defender was again poor at Rugby Park last Saturday, and Lennon explained he and his coaching team were thinking about dropping him.

“It might be one of those situations where he might need a break because he’s been playing a lot of international football. Or we might decide it’s best for him to stay in the team and play his way through it.

“But that’s something we’ll talk about tonight and then we will deal with it tomorrow.”

Whoever Lennon selects at the back – and it should be said that Majstorovic has been far from the only weak link in recent weeks – any frailty is sure to be exploited by a well-drilled Rennes team who drew with Atletico last time out and were unlucky to lose at Udinese. The French club, too, are targeting tonight’s game as a three-pointer, and will patiently probe for soft spots in the Celtic defence before ruthlessly exposing any they find.

Emphasising that his problems went further than the back four, Lennon insisted that missed chances up front had had an effect on the way in which his team’s last two matches had unfolded. “When we are in control of games away from home and we miss chances we need to stay solid at the back. Kilmarnock scored the first goal and it was really the first time they had been anywhere near our box. It was the same story at Tynecastle in the previous game.

“So we have to be a lot more resilient and alert at the back if we are not putting the chances away up front. I am now just looking for a better all-round defensive performance, not just from the back four but also the midfield and the front two.”

Good all-round defence may be enough to give Celtic a point, but if the match is all-square with, say, 20 minutes to go it will be a test of Lennon’s nerve. Does he settle for the point and the boost to the club’s self-respect that would represent, or does he go for broke, and aim for the result his team probably need to keep their chances of qualification alive?