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Deila questions the spirit of Celtic players

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Ronny DeilaRonny Deila was highly critical of his side’s attitude during their 4-3 Europa League defeat from Dinamo Zagreb.

Celtic qualified as runners-up to Salzburg in Group D but will need to find a vast improvement if they are to do anything in the knock-out stage of the competition.

Zagreb went into the match on the back of four successive defeats in the Europa League but cut through Celtic at will with striker Marki Pjarca helping himself to a hat-trick.

It’s not often that Celtic score three goals away from home in Europe but that provided Deila with little consolation with the manager questioning the spirit and approach of his players.

It was a poor performance,” the Celtic boss stated. “We were not 100% today and there was a lack of intensity and aggression from what we had against Motherwell so I’m disappointed that we weren’t 100% up for the game. Defensively we gave away too many chances, when you score four goals away from home you should win.

“Individually there were some bad performances but also as a team in the second half we dropped too much to the back four, there was too much space for Dinamo. We had talked about being compact, not getting balls in-between us but we didn’t get that at the start of the second half. I think that was the main problem, we were too open.”

Deila added: “We will have to be a lot lot better in future but we know that, we had some players who didn’t play today who will give the team more spirit. We had an opportunity to win the game and it didn’t happen.

“Thee team spirit has to be much better, we need to be more compact as a team, we’ve had that in the other away matches so it’s not a big trouble, today we were too open. Away in Europe you need to play a compact aggressive game, you have to keep concentration for 90 minutes, if you don’t do that you will get punished like we did today.

‘I’m disappointed that we didn’t have more energy in the game, we have to have that back again on Sunday, I’m looking forward to that because I don’t have a good feeling in my body just now.

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