CELTIC MANAGER RONNY Deila offered a damning assessment after his team crashed out of the UEFA Champions League at Malmo.
A 2-0 loss on the night in Sweden meant a 4-3 aggregate defeat as the Scottish champions fell at the final hurdle in their attempts to reach the group stages of Europe’s premier club competition for the second successive year.
Markus Rosenberg opened the scoring before half-time and Dedryck Boyata put through his own net, with both goals coming from poorly defended set-pieces. But Deila was equally displeased with his team’s lack of composure in open play.
“I’m very, very disappointed. I think we had a very poor performance,” he told BT Sport.
“The whole team looked scared, nobody wanted the ball, we lost the ball in dangerous situations all the time. When we lose it in situations like that you get opened [up].
We performed not even close to what we can do. We have played well in many, many, many games this season but we looked scared and very stressed.
“That’s my responsibility, I have to go through this, what happened, and learn from this. That is so important.
“We have to get better. We were close [to the Champions League] but when you have a loss like this we don’t deserve to get in there.”
Despite enduring an at times chastening evening, Celtic had reason to be aggrieved on the stroke of half-time when Nir Bitton had a goal ruled out – the officials awarding a free-kick to Malmo despite replays showing home defender Kari Arnason to have handled the ball before the Israeli midfielder converted.
Deila claimed not to have seen the incident clearly from the dugout and he was visibly crestfallen when shown replays during his television interview.
“Of course that’s handball,” he said. “That’s an important situation, of course. It’s a goal and also maybe a red card… I don’t know. I hadn’t seen it before now. That was terrible.”
Originally published Tuesday at 10.53pm
In fairness they did Sh#t the pants
if you can’t defend corners you’re going no where
He’s dead right. They were muck. Celtic in the past mighnt have been technically as good as other teams but they would be up for it on a big European night! No passion tonight. Virgil must have had his bags packed before kick off
They were dreadful. didn’t deserve anything from the game.
Griffiths pulled out on three occassions to contest for the ball in Malmo’s box in the second half. They dont deserve to be anywhere near the Champions League.
Malmo players thought Celtic were too busy thrash talking during the first leg. Might be something in that.
or it might be that they were simply better last night and actually wanted to win the game
celtic just cannot defend.
the sooner we fluck off zonal marking the better.. doesn’t work in schoolboy football and def doesn’t work for celtic! last night was embarrassing as we just didnt have any fight there…
We saw Dundalk push BATE very close this year – that same BATE team would have destroyed Celtic.
Celtic need a strong sevco. Im not a Celtic fan and I detest sevco and their fascist support but the difference is there are three or four clubs in Sweden who regularly give each other a game. The top three or four LOI teams would comfortably hold their own in the SPL
Gives an indication of standards in the SPL.
Ha ja Sverige! Ha ja Malmö!
very dissapointing malmo aren’t even that good like Celtic are gone to shite
Hopefully Aberdeen can break the old firm money monopoly this year, hopefully Celtic dont buy their best players and give the dons half a chance.
Poor team, poorly coached.