ANOTHER LEVEL IS NEEDED NOW
ADOPT a siege mentality at the back and fashion a tie-changing chance on the counter-attack. Celtic’s challenge in Valencia may boil down to a simple scenario, but in truth Europa League progress will only come about via the type of landmark display that has eluded the club for a decade and half.
One must go back to 2004 for Celtic’s last aggregate win in a European knockout tie and the night Martin O’Neill got the club into the quarter-finals of the UEFA Cup courtesy of a win over Barcelona.
Valencia are not in the class of that Barca team of Ronaldinho, Carles Puyol and Xavi but were comfortable winners in Glasgow in midweek. Indeed, there was nothing in Thursday’s 2-0 first-leg defeat to suggest Brendan Rodgers’ team are capable of pulling off a monumental comeback in Spain.
The away leg might suit the running power of Oliver Burke or Odsonne Edouard better than a game in which the Spaniards were quite happy to let their hosts hog the ball and pass it around until they made a mistake.
But expecting either of those talented but raw individuals to conjure the keys to unlock the third most miserly defence in Spain represents a punt.
Those who suspect Rodgers’ time may be coming to an end in Glasgow would reasonably have had their suspicions strengthened by Thursday’s events.
Last summer’s transfer window felt like a watershed moment for the manager as a series of his key transfer targets slipped through the club’s fingers.
The sight of Cristiano Piccini patrolling the right flank for Valencia may have felt like a particular affront. Rodgers thought he had a deal ready to sign the Italian right-back but was gazumped by Valencia, who paid Sporting Lisbon £7million for the transfer.
Rodgers finally got a right-back last month when Jeremy Toljan came in on loan from Borussia Dortmund but with he, Burke, Timothy Weah and the injured Filip Benkovic all due to return to their parent clubs in the summer, another rebuilding job will be required.
Celtic’s accounts show £38million in the bank but while money is available for transfers it’s unlikely the club’s wage structure could support most — if any — of those players on permanent contracts.
‘That’s the model, it’s where it’s at,’ admits Rodgers. ‘It’s not necessarily the club’s fault. They can only bring in a certain type of player, get them to a certain level and then the guys move on because of the money in the game.’ Last summer, Rodgers lost Moussa Dembele to Lyon and Stuart Armstrong to Southampton, while Patrick Roberts’ extended loan expired.
Any of those players might have made a difference against Valencia, a team Rodgers sensed carried itself with greater authority than Celtic without necessarily dwarfing their hosts in terms of talent.
‘The money gives you belief,’ he argues. ‘Ability-wise there isn’t a big difference, but the belief absolutely carried them to a certain stature.
‘That’s the difference between a lot of the players at that next level. But for us, Thursday was disappointing because we are a lot better than that. We lost through our own mistakes. It wasn’t as if they were peppering our goal or speeding up their game or even cutting through us.’
That Valencia enjoy a financial advantage over Celtic is a given but, under O’Neill, Gordon Strachan and Neil Lennon, the club found a way to adapt and elevate its performance levels to a point where the likes of Barca, AC Milan and Benfica could be vanquished. Both Strachan and Lennon got Celtic to knockout stages of the Champions League. Under Rodgers there have been the occasional highs of trading blows en route to score draws with Manchester City and, especially, the outrunning Leipzig on a thrilling night under the new lights. Yet those occasions have been outnumbered by comprehensive and dispiriting defeats to the likes of Bayern Munich, PSG, Bayern Munich and Salzburg. Beyond the issue of personnel, there is a sense among many Celtic fans that they have watched this movie before. The former Liverpool boss has been unbending in his commitment to a possessionbased attacking style that builds play out from defence. Those tactics have brought unprecedented levels of domestic dominance but, time and again, superior European opponents have simply picked Celtic off. As Rodgers later admitted: ‘Valencia are a team who wait for your mistakes’. Of the team that started against Valencia there were at least four players missing who would have started if fully fit — Benkovic, Kieran Tierney, Tom Rogic and record signing Edouard, who appeared from the bench after a spell of niggling injuries.
Edouard’s place has gone to Burke, an expensive loanee from West Brom who has looked occasionally explosive in domestic games but on Thursday precisely like a young winger who has been playing striker for four weeks.
Toljan has helped ease the burden on Mikael Lustig’s tired body but the absence of Tierney on the other side of the defence cost Celtic as Emilio Izaguirre played Ruben Sobrino onside in the build-up to Valencia’s opener.
Rodgers continued: ‘The players aren’t bad footballers. Absolutely not. It’s just a certain level that you can go to. It’s as simple as that. The level is not only belief, it’s also concentration, which plays a huge part at the highest level.
‘One or two errors with concentration cost us.’
After facing Kilmarnock today, Rodgers will begin preparations for a match that might prove his final European tie in charge of Celtic.
He added: ‘The thing about my players is that for the last two-anda-half years they have played 60 games a season. They’ve given me everything. I have absolutely no complaints. Yeah, sometimes we will lack at that higher level which, you know, I can understand.
‘We’ll dust ourselves down. We made a good fist of getting through the group, but we still have another leg to go. If we can get the first goal there it might just give you the belief to go and get something.’