SCOTT Brown, the Celtic captain, last night launched a savage attack on Graeme Shinnie, his Aberdeen counterpart who was called into the Scotland squad this week, and claimed he lacked quality and could only compete with him by fouling.
Brown was the victim of a shocking late challenge by Shinnie in the final Ladbrokes Premiership match of the 2017/18 campaign at Celtic Park on Sunday.
The midfielder confirmed he will be fine to play against Motherwell in the William Hill Scottish Cup final at Hampden this Saturday – a game which his side need to win to become the first to complete a double treble.
But he savaged his opponent, who he exchanged a few terse words with at the end of the match at the weekend, claimed he had “not got great quality” and described his foul as a “little boy’s tackle”.
“The ankle’s fine,” said Brown. “It takes more than that to keep me down. It was a Graeme Shinnie tackle. It sums him up really.
“We had a nice wee chat afterwards. I’ve matured. He was saying that he got close to the ball. But I watched it back and it is kind of a little boy’s tackle – waiting until I was past him. My pace obviously done him in his prime and I got past him.”
Shinnie, who was named in Alex McLeish’s 24-man squad for the end-of-season tour of Peru and Mexico on Monday, had been unrepentant when he was interviewed on television and said “what goes around comes around”.
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But Brown responded: “I’m not the one with 15 bookings this season. I think Graeme runs about, he tackles, stuff like that. He’s not got great quality, but he does the best he possibly can.
“It’s the only thing he can probably do to try and stop us – to try and make a bad tackle. To be fair on him, it was a good bad tackle.”
Brown took some time to recover from the foul, which Shinnie was booked for, but he stressed he would be alright to start for Celtic against their top flight rivals Motherwell this weekend.
“My ankle locks now and then,” he said. “It has got no ligaments left in it. It kind of locked. I just needed to open it up again.”
“I felt it quite high up at the time. I was thinking ‘thank goodness I still wear those grandad shinnies that come all the way around and protect everything!’ It wasn’t too bad. I have had worse, but it wasn’t great, especially at the time of year. But as soon as I got up I knew it would be alright.”
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Brown stressed he has no concerns about facing Motherwell on Saturday despite the Fir Park club’s renowned uncompromising approach to games.
“We’ve played Motherwell quite a lot this season so we know how they play,” he said. “They are physical but they’re very fair. They use their bodies and they don’t lunge in to tackles or do stupid challenges. It’s up to the striker and they play off second balls.
“We like the physical battle as well, we showed that against Hearts. We tried in the first half to keep and pass the ball but we realised the grass was like a jungle so we couldn’t really do that.
“So we got our big guys out and played it into them and they bullied the Hearts centre-halves. We’ve done it against Motherwell as well. We play it into Moussa (Dembele) and play off second balls. We’ve got that in our locker as well.”
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