Tommy Gun

The Derby win was built upon improving cohesion (well, after the 3^rd minute!) and a disciplined defensive team performance.

The first half was for craft. The second for graft.

Pivotal to the come back was Celtic’s Australian play maker Rogic.

This provides an interesting comparison opportunity as the much-heralded Ramsey was thrown into their team. The games he was brought to perform in, we are told.

Both players scored and both occupied the “10” positions for roughly 60 minutes (Rogic 62 and Ramsey 65).

Rogic and Ramsey

The rankings reflect across both sides and remember each only played around an hour.

Rogic was Celtic’s main goal threat. He received the ball in the box the most of any Celts, had the most shots, the highest xG and of course scored the important leveller.

Rogic completed only 16 passes @ 73% but was clearly highly efficient with his possessions.

Ramsey’s early goal was a result of excellent positioning and movement from him. Outside of that he struggled to influence the game too much. One assisting pass for a long-range effort, and one secondary assist.

Ramsey was on the ball a fair bit – he completed 26 of 35 passes (74%) but most of this was in non-threatening areas – see below for heat maps.

Defensively, Rogic was 2W/4L for challenges and interceptions and recovered the ball 10 times.

Ramsey also had 10 recoveries, and won both his duels.

The respective heat maps show that Rogic tended to play more central whilst Ramsey was pushed wider in attack. Rogic, as we saw above, managed more touches in more dangerous areas. He also actively filled into the right half space defensively.

As an aside, both FotMob and Sofascore generate match ratings (which I hate for, hopefully, obvious reasons) and had them at almost parity.

FotMob – Rogic 8.2 – Ramsey 8.0

Sofascore – Rogic 7.4 – Ramsey 7.6!

lol

Summary

Rogic was part of a spine of Celtic top performers on the day. His 62 minutes of action saw the largest scoring threat of anyone on the pitch. He outshone the “greatest player ever to play in the SPFL” (sic) on the day but to be fair Ramsey has not had many minutes, well, for quite a few years.

Rogic is only one year younger than Ramsey, remarkably.