Stephen Robinson tied himself in knots as he tried to justify his reaction to his side’s goal at Celtic Park today.
The hoops were leading 2-0 when the ball was put out of play to allow Ryan Christie to go off for treatment with the home players expecting the ball to be returned in time honoured fashion.
Motherwell decided differently with James Scott running at the Celtic goal, cutting the ball back to Gboly Aribiyi who stuck the ball into the net. 2-1 and game on thought the Motherwell bench.
Kevin Clancy was powerless to disallow the goal but Robinson could have ordered his players to allow Celtic to score from the restart to restore their two goal lead, he chose not to do that.
After claiming that he didn’t know what to do Robinson decided to blame Scott despite having the chance to cancel out the incident by allowing Celtic to score from the restart.
“In truth I didn’t know what to do,” the Motherwell boss explained to Radio Scotland. “I’ve never been involved. Listen we’ve got a young boy staring his first game, 18 years of age, on a couple of hundred quid a week, great prospect, super super boy that we have real high hopes for.
“He got caught up in the occasion, it shouldn’t happen but it did and he’ll recover from that. He’ll be a top top footballer Jamesy. It’s not what we wanted, I’m not sure what you do after that, do you restart the game? I don’t know, I said to Brendan I’ve no idea what to do, it happened but what I do know is that it will deflect from how good a performance we put in.”
It took Celtic until nine minutes from the final whistle to restore their two goal advantage when Odsonne Edouard scored from a free kick. Oliver Burke made it 4-1 to Celtic with a goal in stoppage time.
