No-one expected Celtic to go to germany and win, but the consensus among the experts was that they did themselves absolutely no favours.
Dortmund were ruthless in their punishment, seemingly scoring each time Brendan Rodgers’ team made a mess of things in a horror show of an first half. The second wasn’t much better as Nuri Sahin’s side pushed for more goals and the Premiership champions can be thankful they only managed two of them. The gulf was openly acknowledged by just about every pundit in the aftermath, but there was no mere acceptance that there’s nothing Celtic can do.
Brendan Rodgers has been questioned over his unwillingness to change it up when facing high calibre Champions League opponents, much in the same way predecessor Ange Postecoglou was. However, the risk of having a different kind of manager was also warned against given the potential consequences include not even having games like this, painful to watch as they may be.
Record Sport looks at the reaction from the big names who were watching on.
James Horncastle
“The problem is that if they want to risk it, and have a different kind of manager; a Neil Lennon or Martin O’Neill, in the past, who don’t play football that is on trend today, but is maybe a bit more risky. Maybe they don’t win the league as comfortably as they did in the past. They miss out on that Champions League revenue. If you are a club like Celtic and you miss out on the Champions League that is like relegation.”
Owen Hargreaves
“If you make mistakes like that, you are going to get punished. The question (to Brendan Rodgers) is fair; are you going to change anything? When you are playing top teams they can hurt you, but there is nothing wrong with having a different look from the opposition.”
Neil Lennon
“I didn’t expect celtic to win. I expected them to give a good account of themselves with the form that they have and expected them to score, which they did. But they let the game get away from them. They were far too passive with their passive and didn’t do the dirty bits of the game well enough. They weren’t physical enough. Too nice. They didn’t turn Dortmund at all and they kept playing the same way,”
Chris Sutton
“Celtic wanted to go toe to toe. Good to be positive but there comes a time when you have to be a bit streetwise and understand levels . Throwing lots of bodies forward when you’re 7-1 down seemed a bit naive – a bit like Madrid – way too open and ruthlessly exploited…”
Martin Keown
The problem is they are so much better than the other teams domestically. They don’t have opponents that will test them.”