After last season’s successes, and then manager Ange Postecoglou’s unfortunately timed departure to English Premier League side Tottenham Hotspur, plenty of Celtic fans wondered what might be in store as previously successful gaffer Brendan Rodgers returned to Parkhead for a second time.
With the restart of the 2023/24 season, our Scottish Premiership campaign is going well and we already sit back in top spot in the league with 13 points from our opening five games, thanks to four wins and a draw, and with eleven goals scored and only three conceded, we have a league best eight goal difference.
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This week we embarked on our Champions League campaign, and we had our opening Group E battle with Feyenoord on Tuesday evening, and despite our league form, it was sadly a case of what could go wrong across the 90 minutes did.
The Group E battle is far from over yet as we face Atletico Madrid and Lazio, but having fell behind on the stroke of half time, the last thing we needed was to see was a second half implosion where Gustaf Lagerbielke saw two yellow cards and then he was quickly joined by Thiago Holm who earned himself a straight red. In the circumstances, a 2-0 loss is probably favourable, but as we were searching for a first away European win since Anderlecht back in 2017, it has to go down as a massive disappointment given we started brightly and did create a couple of good chances that could have gone our way – before we were woefully under strength.
Gaffer Rodgers was bullish after the defeat, feeling he saw enough to know we would do better.
“What we showed is that we’re going to be competitive. We started really well. We looked a threat and progressed the ball. With better decisions, we might’ve had an opportunity to get in front. Unfortunately, we get two players sent off. It’s a difficult level at 11 v 11. The players kept going, it was harsh on them. The first 60 minutes we were well in the game. They never gave up. With one or two more players coming back, it’ll hopefully put us in really good stead for the remainder of the competition.”
Skipper Callum McGregor shared his confidence, saying.
“They get the goal right before half time and that undoes a lot of good work from us. It would have been easy to lose three, four or five at that point which is testament to the group. Then to get two men sent off in quick succession takes the game away from us…we’ll learn the lesson. There are five games to go so hopefully they’ll be walking off thinking we didn’t give up, we didn’t quit, we were still fighting for each other at the end. It’s a disappointing night but we have five games to try and fix it.”
Over to the players to make that happen.
