Ross County manager Malky Mackay wants Staggies' attackers to embrace the kind of cool under fire shown by Celtic talent Matt O'Riley in the Champions League
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Malky Mackay wants Ross County’s creative players to learn from the ice cool head Celtic’s Matt O’Riley showed on a fiery Champions League evening against Atletico Madrid.
The Dingwall team has netted just three times in their last seven outings, with the final pass and killer touch eluding them too often - and again in a scoreless draw at Dundee on Tuesday night.
Controversial VAR disallowed goal aside, Mackay admits he is grappling with the eternal managerial dilemma of balancing attack and defence.
But he felt the excellence of O’Riley’s calmly executed pass for Kyogo Furuhashi’s opener against the Spaniards summed up everything he needed to convey to his forward-thinking players.
Mackay said: “It's the little things, in the final moment.
“We talk about bodies on fire, heads in the fridge. They’ve got to have that calmness and make the last thing they do, the best or most important thing they do.
“Sometimes all that is about is the weight of a pass, sliding someone in - you can get excited and over-kick it or hit the defender with it.
“Whereas, slide it in properly and they go and they put it in the net.
“I was watching Celtic against Atletico Madrid and they were sensational.
“Matt O’Riley’s pass (for Kyogo) is so calm. There is fire going off everywhere and he had the calmness to put it into the player’s path.
“Can you make sure the last thing you do is the best thing you do?”
Mackay recalls an in-depth conversation he had with Ian Holloway, the former Blackpool and Crystal Palace boss, about the difficulty in finding the right balance between attacking instincts and defensive solidity.
He stressed: “Balance for a manager is always the yin to the yang of attacking to defending – how much you throw caution to the wind and how much you are conservative.
“The balance is what all managers have to try and strive for.
“I remember talking to Ian Holloway a long time ago, about when Blackpool went into the Premier League for the first time.
“They were incredibly adventurous and exciting. They were losing games 5-4, because they were playing against really good teams who could catch them on the break better than they could flood forward.
“The conversation was actually after his time at Blackpool, when he went to Crystal Palace.
“He then tried to rethink how they stayed in the Premier League. It was about being more conservative, but they got to a point where they couldn’t score a goal.
“This was his dilemma – but we are all the same.
“If you keep a clean sheet, you just need the one chance. That breeds confidence as well.
“Other than those silly individual errors, your team is strong.
“We needed that (against Dundee). We came off the back of a game at Pittodrie where we let ourselves down.
“There are a handful of games in three years that we have really not been at the races in the game and that was one.
“I said to them that there was a time before when we would have lost that game on Tuesday, but we didn’t.”
