Rangers 1-1 Celtic: The Dio-mandate

Morning all, Rangers battled to an entertaining 1-1 draw with Celtic yesterday. Rangers may have felt they slightly edged the chances in the game, but a draw was probably fair.

When I woke up in the morning, I had a feeling it was going to be a 0-0 draw. Both team's line-ups were looking a bit bare and honestly I wasn't expecting any kind of slick attacking play.

We lined up in a 4-3-1-2 shape, which is how we looked when chasing the game against Hibs, Bajrami positioned behind Cerny and Dessers. The shape was far more effective on this occasion, Celtic struggled to deal with Bajrami's movement into wide areas and we found it easy to create overloads in the first half.

Balogun ought to have put us 1 up after a few minutes when he clipped the cross bar with a free header off a corner.

We looked to have opened the scoring with a Raskin header from a wide free kick, but a VAR check concluded that it was offside.

Celtic had the odd half chance but their best chance of the half feel to Adam Idah, through one on one with Kelly. He rather skewed his effort but Kelly stood up well to save it.

Celtic tried to take the corner quicky, we won the ball back and from the resulting break a brilliant Diomande pass was made to look even better as it was dummied by Cerny. Dessers took a touch or two to get some separation from the defender before slotting it past the onrushing keeper.

It was a really good goal and the Nigerian's 25th goal in all competitions this season. Given his regular antics in front of goal, it's another very good goal return for Rangers number 9. Still think we need to move him on given his wages though.

Dessers puts Rangers Infront

In the second half Celtic adjusted their shape slightly which allowed them to be more of a threat in wide areas. Their equaliser came after Maeda got away from Tavernier, Souttar's clearance deflected off the Japanese forward and fell to Idah, he turned smartly but his shot took a big deflection off John Souttar and eluded Kelly to restore parity.

It was a bit of a sloppy goal to concede but there was a hefty chunk of luck involved from Celtic's perspective.

Even though we'd been good until this point, I knew there would be no more goals. Igamane came off the bench and caused plenty issues for Celtic. Hagi was introduced and then sadly went off injured.

Maeda had a very good chance late on that Kelly did well to save. But it came from a slack pass from Tav initially.

When the final whistle went I felt plenty of apathy as expected. Atleast we hadn't lost and we were closer to the end of the season.

The only player who really got me up off my feet was the man that lent his name to this article title, Mohammed Diomande.

The Ivorian was absolutely superb here, he was top for all the stats you'd want from a midfielder, he fought for everything. His little flicks and turns bamboozled the Celtic midfield. And as mentioned his pass through created the opener.

This kind of performance has become the norm for Dio. Every week this season he's been asked to carry majority of the midfield burden on the ball. For some he doesn't show enough, but for me, alongside Raskin, he is the jewel in our crown at the moment.

Hopefully we get a proper manager in, with the takeover coming aswell, it's a chance to get people in that will get the best out of our players.

Diomande dancing away from Celtic challenges as he did all game.

There's not much else to comment on about the game. I hope you all have a good week. Nearly there.