Last Night’s International Beating Contained An Important Lesson For Celtic.

Last night was a significantly chastening one for our national team.

It was not just the loss but the ease with which the England team beat us that will leave a mark. What’s good to see is that there is no sense of recrimination or self-flagellation over it; the usual gallery of goons might be crowing their heads off but most people grasp the main message and don’t care about all the surrounding noise.

We were simply beaten by a better team.

That’s all the warning going into the Champions League that we are ever going to get. Not about being beaten by better teams, but about the nagging desire to beat ourselves up over it. I know that there are sections of our support which will give the club a kicking if we lose in Rotterdam and then at home to Lazio, but if we’re simply over-matched what is the point?

I want to see us try. I want to see us attempt to shock Europe by marrying a top manager with the right sort of backing from behind the scenes. I cannot but conclude that our club has failed lamentably to give Brendan Rodgers the sort of tools he needs to do that job.

I’ll leave it to other people to praise “the strategy”; project players will never take us past quality European sides. Never. No matter who we have in the dugout, and the pro-board stooges can say all they like about us not being able to “compete” in the transfer market but it’s not that we can’t, it’s that we don’t want to and have ceased even trying.

Remember what I said; this is not something forced on us.

This is a choice. This is a choice that those at the top of Celtic have made.

This is the path they have decided to pursue. All the rest of it is white noise. We bought ten players in the window when, realistically, we should have been aiming for four. Four to improve the first team. As it is, we go into this Champions League Group next week with a weaker starting eleven than we ended the last one.

And there will be consequences for that. Of course there will. This is not travelling to Ibrox to play a team that was overhyped and overblown and managed by a complete fool who I was entirely confident Rodgers could get the better of. These are the Dutch champions and they deserve our total respect. The thing about the Champions League is that it is the ultimate forum for exposing delusional thinking, and I simply will not indulge in it.

It is good to be at the top table. The financial benefits of it will be enormous. I harbour no illusions about what we can achieve in that competition. We will have to be excellent to finish third in the group.

Not just good, excellent.

Scotland fans going to the game last night were entitled to be in good spirits, but the unshakable confidence some of them had in being able to rock England to its foundations was entirely misplaced.

So is all the Anglo-centric arrogance which has poured out of the mouths of some of the stupidest people in the commentariat.

All I’m going to say for the moment is that if their own national team is as good as they think it is then they are the greatest underachievers in all of world football. If it isn’t then they are its greatest fantasists who no matter the lessons make the same arrogant, stupid assumptions over and over and over again and don’t ever learn.

Either way, their sneering at Scotland is contemptible. Come back to us when you win your second major international honour, ever, and can justify the egotism. These people are very good at punching down. Every pub hardman is. That they are perennial losers in their own weight class should keep them awake at night.

And the point of that is to remind us of where we are.

There are people here at home who are sharpening their pencils in eager anticipation of writing about how we’ve let Scotland down. But these are the same people who refuse to credit us with a single one of our mammoth achievements in this country because we can outspend all of our domestic opposition.

That we are the Ross County’s of this Champions League Group is something they will never acknowledge, and it’s precisely what we must keep in mind. We will be judged harshly, no matter the level of the competition we face, and that is why I will treasure anything we do achieve and try not to lose my mind if we’re simply outclassed.

Because we are the underdogs here, and it’s not defeatist thinking to recognise that.

In fact, saying it out loud and acting accordingly might be the smartest thing we do. There is no way the manager will view it any other way … and he has to if he’s going to get the tactics right, and doing that is the only way we’re going to get the right results.

I am looking forward to this group, to testing ourselves against these teams.

I am trying not to look at it through the prism of our domestic status.

These players will give it their all. If that proves not to be good enough it’ll be in part because most of these guys are still young and aren’t at that level yet but that’s what happens when you fill your side with inexperience … the best we can hope for is a disciplined performance which produces a result. In short, we’re hoping for a minor miracle.

And because I acknoweldge that, I’ll be prepared for whatever outcome we get.