Celtic Beaten Tonight Not By Better Quality But By Absolutely Stupid Mistakes.

There was a certain inevitability about what we witnessed tonight, a tired grim certainty.

At 2-1 up with ten to go, after a pretty decent 80 minutes marred by a couple of mistakes and the customary ridiculous set-piece concession, I knew we had it in us to shoot ourselves in the foot.

There had been too many scares amongst the mistakes, too many times the German side got opportunities which hadn’t quite fallen right for them.

I don’t mind losing to superior quality. I’ve seen it happen loads of times in Europe.

I don’t have an issue with that. I mind losing to basic stupid errors.

I mind spotting a guy on the far past with nobody near him, who you know will have all the time in the world to pick his spot for the lay-off if they get it out to him.

I mind seeing a guy standing on the edge of the penalty area, totally unmarked, to smash home the winner.

I mind, as I said a moment ago, the almost set-your-watch-to-it spectacle of a corner putting us behind.

This is basic stuff, and none of this happened because we were too gung-ho, because we left every man up the pitch.

Put someone on the posts for the corner and you don’t concede the first goal.

Have someone marking the guy at the back post and he doesn’t make that killer pass so easily.

And for God’s sakes, do not let one of their best players have all the time in the world to strike that ball anywhere he likes for the winner.

That is rank. That requires some serious introspection from the coaching department.

It is simply bad and it would be bad against any opponent, but against their kind of quality you are asking for trouble and trouble is happy to chap the door.

We are unlucky with the Bitton injury.

But hasn’t the manager seen enough to know that like-for-like attacking substitutions, against Leverkusen away, when all we need is a draw and we’re in a 2-1 lead, is completely barmy?

Especially when it weakens your team overall by depriving you of two of your hardest working players.

One off for a defensive player would have been smart.

I have no idea why playing it safe and leaving Germany with a massive result was seen as the lesser move.

We got what we deserved tonight for such basic mistakes.

There is no excuse for those kinds of errors.

I appreciate that without the team’s attacking philosophy we wouldn’t have got goals in Spain and in Germany, which is probably more than most of us hoped for.

The manager is onto something there; we had the lead in both of these massive games.

But he refuses to compromise and that has cost us a place in the next round of this competition.

It has turned what would have been a rocking night at Celtic Park, with the best of this club certain to have been on display, into a damp squib of a tie meaning absolutely nothing.

There is no escaping the reality of this; with proper game management and some defensive common sense we would have taken the scalps of the two biggest teams in this group, away from home.

Tonight would have been one of the most memorable away results this club has achieved in years, and here we are cursing the utter stupidity of it, the utter waste, instead.

Not a happy camper tonight, not at all.

I said earlier today that these games are about learning lessons; by God that was a sore one to take.

If we don’t learn from this, if the coaching team repeats those mistakes, then they will have big, big questions to answer.