Brendan Rodgers said last night he wasn’t embarrassed about the result.
Neither was I.
A lot of the Celtic players were, however, and I was pleased by that even as I thought they’d probably feel a lot less so this morning, in the cold light of day.
Last night we were stripped and flayed by a superlative team, playing football with abandon and joy and scored for fun. Being on the end of it hurt, as any defeat does, but I can keep a little perspective about it, and I can view it realistically.
But the players who were out there feel anger at themselves, and that can only be to the good. They wouldn’t be professionals if they didn’t. Some have already accused them of giving Barca too much respect, but Scott Brown nailed it when he talked about stray passes and simple mistakes. We can’t be at the level of the Catalan giants, but we can aspire to stop doing daft stuff, and I am sure Brendan will have gotten that message across loud and clear too.
Listen, it’s easy enough to understand how you can lose five second half goals to a team like that. At four – and four was a piece of magic – heads went down and whatever energy was left in the legs started to wane, little by little. The players realised it had become an exercise in damage limitation. There can’t be many feelings in football worse than that, and they happen to players at every level and to opponents of Barcelona more than most.
Professional pride has been dented here. That’s going to smart for a while. But it will lead to better performances in the future. I thought a lot of our mistakes last night came from simply rushing; there were moments when we were four and five down that we seemed in almost indecent haste to move the ball. What for? To get back into it? Please. The best thing we could have done at three was to simply slow the Hell down when on the ball and been a little more aggressive off it.
In the end, it would have made very little difference.
Barcelona can destroy any side in world football, and that’s where I think I’d like to see a little more thinking from our fans.
I’ve read a lot of people say we’re no longer a Champions League team.
What they actually mean, of course, is that we’re no longer a top tier Champions League team.
But who really thinks Sporting Lisbon would have done that to us? Or Besiktas? Or Monaco? Or PSV?
Barcelona are so far ahead of those teams that trying to judge where we are in relation to this tournament based on what happened last night is an exercise in futility.
There are three teams in the game right now – Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich – who make the latter stages of this competition year in, year out, without fail and they do that not because they are better than the likes of us but because they are simply better than everyone else out there, full stop. Our luck – our horrendous luck – was to have been drawn against one of those teams (the same bloody one!) for the umpteenth time in the last ten years.
Group B would have given us a fighting chance of qualification. Groups E, G and H also.
I’m not saying we would have bested the teams in those Groups, but we wouldn’t have lost by seven goals in any of the matches either. At home I’d have fancied us to take points, and qualification would have been by no means impossible.
Last night was not a reflection on where we are but a reflection on where Barcelona are; far and away the best football side on the planet.
This is not an admission of defeat across the board, and it doesn’t say we don’t belong on this stage. We’re just cursed, by a bad draw and a confluence of circumstances that ought to have had us hiding under the bed.
I’m not even going to pick over the scab of going through our record prior to last night; what’s the point in that? There’s a mere handful of people at Celtic Park who were even on the books last time we were in the Champions League; some in the media want to look back over 20 years of results. For what purpose? To learn what lessons? We have a new manager and a new plan, and the past is of little relevance to us as we go forward.
For all that, I’m glad our players are hurting.
I want them to hurt after a night like that.
I want them to reflect on what they could have done better, but without putting themselves under too much pressure.
I want them to be up for the next challenge, Inverness at the weekend, and to be more focussed than ever before.
The best way to recover from a drubbing like that is to do it to someone else.