Celtic manager makes interesting Glasgow Derby claim

There is a lot of talk about the upcoming Glasgow Derby between Celtic and the Rangers, set to be played at Parkhead on February 2. The game was originally scheduled to be played in early January but had to be pushed back after the winter break was called forward as a result of new crowd restrictions. Now though, there appear to be fresh question marks about the game going forward.

Celtic have quite a few players who could be out on international duty at that point of time as do the Rangers.

If three or more players of a team are out on international duty and unavailable, a club can request the game to be postponed. Now, it remains to be seen if either team end up taking that option if the opportunity arises.

Ange Postecoglou has not ruled out the possibility judging from his comments but does not appear to be losing sleep over it either. As reported by the Daily Record, the Celtic manager said about the situation:

"“It’s not a problem yet.“I could spend hours thinking about what we’re going to do, strategise and having meetings about it – then in the end find out that only one player gets selected.“So I’m not going to worry about it.“We’ll plan as we always have, that when we lose our players to international duty we’ll crack on and play the games we need to play.“As it stands, none of the players have been selected yet. If that happens, we’ll look at it then.”"

Celtic manager does not rule out possibility of postponement request

It will be interesting to see what Celtic, or the Rangers, end up doing if three or more of their players are out on international duty at that point of time.

For Celtic, Kyogo Furuhashi, Reo Hatate, Daizen Maeda and Yosuke Ideguchi for Japan, Tom Rogic for Australia and Cameron Carter-Vickers for the United States, are the players who could possibly receive international call ups at that point of time.

Thus, it remains to be seen how things unfold over the coming weeks. But it must be said that if Celtic find themselves in a position where they cannot name their strongest team, they should definitely consider making the postponement request, with a lot riding on the result of the Glasgow Derby in terms of the Premiership title race.