John Lundstram has looked more like his old self recently, not quite the Lundstram that we saw against Borussia Dortmund, but there has been a desire, a want and a purpose about how he has been going about his business, even if his passing hasn’t quite been on point.
The 28-year old midfielder now has three goals in his last three league games and it’s as good an indication as any that we should be allowing him more freedom to attack, if he played his best football alongside Ryan Jack in the past, on today’s performance, it looks as though there could be an equally as effective partnership with James Sands.
It is only one game but, it was a fine performance with Lundstram at the heart of it, and he spoke after the game about the pressures of playing at Ibrox and of the title race, as reported by The Glasgow Times:
“This place can probably be one of the hardest for others to come and play football when the fan base is behind us.
“They can really be the 12th man for us. But sometimes when things aren’t going your way – of course they want you to win and they want to win by two, three goals which we should do in the league, let’s get it right – it can be difficult.
“But today they were behind us and I thought we played for them and played with them.
“Celtic have never been spoken about. Not once in our dressing room. We don’t need to speak about Celtic. When we’re not playing Celtic there’s no need for us to speak about Celtic.
“We’re four points behind Celtic off our own back – nothing to do with Celtic.
“They beat us 4-0 away from home because we didn’t perform. It’s on us – it’s nothing to do with them.”
Lundstram is right. We can count ourselves unlucky to have dropped points against Hibs, but against Livingston and Celtic we were solely to blame. Both games were a shambles.
He might only have been here for 18-months but he clearly has no time for our city rivals and I’d expect, when we meet again for the second derby of the season, that there will be an entirely different approach from Rangers. Hopefully, Lundstram’s return to form is pivotal to us clawing back the gap at the top of the table.