ANGE Postecoglou has expressed confidence that Giorgios Giakoumakis can become an important player for Celtic in the second half of the season after watching the Greek striker work through the winter shutdown and get himself fully fit.
Giakoumakis, a £2.5m signing from Dutch club VVV-Venlo back in August, struggled with knocks after arriving in Scotland and only scored once for the Parkhead club before suffering a knee injury that required minor surgery at the start of November.
However, his countryman Postecoglou, whose team take on Hibernian in a cinch Premiership game at Parkhead tomorrow night, expects the six-times capped 27-year-old to show supporters what he is capable of up front in the months ahead.
“Giorgios is back in,” he said. “He’s done all the rehab. We gave most players the week off but him and a couple of others worked right through and he’s all good to go.
“He’s one of three or four who probably didn’t have an ideal start. He came in late and had several challenges, not doing pre-season and the season already up and running when he arrived.
“He had a couple of injury setbacks and there’s been a whole range of things. So, we did have to be a bit patient with him.
“They weren’t all going to hit the ground running in terms of an immediate impact. Two or three of the signings were quick off the blocks. But others needed a bit of time.
“Hopefully, now Giorgios is ready to go again. He’s trained really well and he’ll get an opportunity in the games ahead to show what he’s all about. But all the players are important.”
Kyogo Furuhashi and Daizen Maeda are both set to be called up by Japan later this month for their World Cup qualifiers against China and Saudi Arabia and the Celtic manager anticipates their fellow forward Giakoumakis will get game time.
“Right now we don’t know who’s going to be away on international duty,” he said. “That’s still to be decided. We’ll deal with that if and when it happens.
“There’s no doubt, though, that with the fixtures ahead of us we’re going to need as many players available as possible.
“I think it’s the one area in the first half of the year that we struggled in terms of consistency of performance. We kind of have the squad now to be able to rotate and keep people fresh.
“We suffered injuries before because we weren’t able to. There are two or three back available to us which will help because of the load we have with fixtures.”
Asked if he will request the postponement of any fixtures if three or more members of his squad are called up for international duty this month – as SPFL rules permit him to do – Postecoglou said: “That falls into the department of stuff that I don’t really think about.
“It’s not a problem yet. I could spend hours thinking about it and what we were going to do and strategise and have meetings on it – then in the end find out that only one gets selected. So, I’m not going to worry about that.
“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. At the moment, there’s no point even thinking about that. As it stands, none of the players have been selected, so until that happens we’ll look at it then.”
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel