Neil Lennon has little time to conduct a Europa League post mortem.
A disastrous 45 minutes against Copenhagen saw Celtic crash out of the competition with echoes of the Champions League exit to Cluj in August.
After that defeat the hoops needed extra-time to struggle past Dunfermline in the League Cup before getting their campaign back on track with wins home and away against AIK Solna and a derby victory at Ibrox.
St Johnstone in the Scottish Cup and Livingston’s plastic pitch are the immediate worries for Lennon as he looks to lift his players for the domestic challenges.
Covering his post match interview on BT Sport the Daily Record reports Lennon saying:
I think the (opening) goal gave them oxygen, and the manner of the goal obviously set us back. So it took us a little while to find our feet again in the game. There was a bit of anxiety out there, nervous play.
But then they galvanised themselves, they got the equaliser and you’re thinking: ‘great, we’ve got what we deserved at last’. And then we shot ourselves in the foot.
We’ve got a game on Sunday so we’ve got to park this. There have been a lot of highs in this Europa League campaign, this is very, very disappointing.
We’ll pick ourselves up and go again on Sunday. We’ll look at where we went wrong tonight, but when I analyse the first half as I’m standing here we were well in control. Then we made a basic error and that’s given the opposition lots of encouragement to stay in the tie.
St Johnstone go into Sunday’s match on the back of a 2-2 home draw with Steven Gerrard’s side while Livi’s Scottish Cup exit has given them 10 days to prepare for the visit of Celtic.
