Celtic, The Champions League And Suicidal Tendencies.

Weak. So very, very weak.

Mentally weak perhaps, like that Hearts team at Ibrox losing an equaliser in the last minute and then handing them three points.

The idea was not to concede early. We did that. To keep our discipline. We couldn’t. To not self-destruct, which we do.

Maeda’s red card will be called out as another example of VAR screwing us, but I am really not interested in that. It’s a terrible decision, terrible, and they are one of the most cynical teams in Europe but that’s not why we’re out.

Palma’s booking, which rules him out for Napoli, is an atrocious decision but it’s the way this competition has gone for us.

And of course, we concede at the end of the half, wrecking any chance we have of getting in at the break, reorganising and standing some remote chance of grabbing something from the game. The second half was a shambles.

Absolutely abysmal and there are no excuses for it.

If we’re focussing on VAR tonight and that red card we’re ignoring other issues and we ought not to be doing that because VAR was not our biggest problem.

Yes, we were overmatched by a much better side, but we have suicidal tendencies at this level and when you do some of this stuff you get punished for it. How many more punishments should our support need to endure before the penny drops?

Why can our players not just keep their heads and not panic under pressure? Do we go out onto the pitch in these games with a defeatist mentality, so that when the inevitable early goal is conceded we revert to frustration and starting to flap?

Why are they incapable of keeping cool and playing through it? Part of it is not having the right personnel and we didn’t need to see this game tonight to know it.

I think Hart was pretty terrible.

That we are still relying on him when people knew last season that we needed a replacement is pretty shocking.

Greg Taylor should not be playing at this level.

He’s a good player, nowhere near good enough for this though.

Paolo Bernardo is a decent footballer, but he’s a Benfica project player who had barely kicked a first team ball, forced on a manager who needed a midfield enforcer.

I get tired of the sound of my own voice on this front; the boss was lamentably, shockingly, let down this summer by a board which brags on its financial performance whilst that of the team on the pitch continues to slide in a manner which is unforgivable when it doesn’t have to be this way.

Rodgers himself was weak in allowing that. This is his reputation they are playing Russian Roulette with and he ought never to have let them do it. Whatever he thought he was coming here to do, it was not this.

If he doesn’t get some of his players in January, we could be heading for a big showdown between him and the upper echelons and in case they haven’t noticed, they are not the most popular people amongst our support right now, and it doesn’t matter whether or not that’s fair, it’s a fact and they will ignore that at their peril.

But what really nags at me is this mental weakness, this inferiority complex, because that’s part of it. You saw it in that second half; we came out as if we’d already been beat, we accepted that fate, we stopped even trying to play and what was already heading towards being a bad night turned into a farcical one.

It is unacceptable for a Celtic team to chuck it in that fashion.

And yet we’ve seen it at this level over and over again.

Rodgers knows neurolinguistics, but that’s nowhere near as effective as bringing in a good sports psychologist would be, and I think we could do worse than to plant one of those in the operation, just so long as the boss signs off on it, and why wouldn’t he?

I’ve spent the week writing about clubs in our league with lower-case ambition. I know that at this level our own club is guilty of it.

The board refuses to even try and improve our chances, and the players get paralysed like rabbits in the headlights when things don’t go their way. At Celtic Park against Lazio something happened to the team the moment the Palma goal was chopped off, and you could almost see the sucker punch coming.

It’s all well and good accepting that we’re not at the level of Atletico Madrid, and that no amount of money we spend will bring us up to their standard; that’s not the point. Eleven men went onto that pitch tonight against another eleven men, and if the lesser team can keep calm and do the right things it has a chance.

When it meekly accepts that status it has none.

It’s all the things we don’t do to give ourselves the best chance, all the ways in which we seem to accept our fate almost like every other team in this country bar one does before the season even starts, that rankles.

Celtic is a Pot 4 side right now and we act like one. In our mental weaknesses we play as if we believe that’s our level, but in fact Pot 3 is more than possible for us and it’s where we should be and would be if we got our act together.

From there, you try to be all you can be. Shock enough of the Pot 2 sides and you put yourselves on the brink of that.

It’s a long and difficult road, made much harder by our own unwillingness even to try. What point is there in being at this level?

To put money in the bank as if we were a multi-national for-profit?

Where is the merit in that? We’re a football team and this is what football teams live for, this level, nights like these.

Except that we don’t because we’re just here to make up the numbers and it’s almost like the whole club accepts that before going out there.

And they shouldn’t, not at Celtic.

If things are going to change, they have to start there, in the heads of these guys.

Whether people think this is our level or not, here we are, and as long as we are I want to see us act as if we take that seriously, as if we belong.