ROBERTO MANCINI

FORGET THE AZZURRI,I’LL GIVE CELTIC EURO BLUES

up the heat in Glasgow. The Russians looked rusty after more than two months off but Mancini added: “The players are ready. We won’t change a lot because they are in good form.

“For me it’s not so important to change the players, what we must do is change the result.

“We won all our group matches but group games are always different to playing twice in a knockout match.

“However, I am confident we can have a good game.

“We will go into this fully concentrated and we shall play without pressure which is going to be important.

“In the end I thought we played an okay game. We made a mistake when we conceded a goal.

“But we were two months without a competitive game and that was our biggest problem, to play in such a big match after such a long time off.

“We will be better after some more days of training. I believe we have the same chance as Celtic to go through.”

Zenit defender Igor Smolnikov is sure his side won’t underestimate Celtic. He said: “The problem last week wasn’t our fitness because we had done our preparation.

“But it was the first game back for us and you could see Celtic have started their season well and were in better physical shape.

“They started the game very quickly and gave us problems.

“We are at home now and we are going to show a completely different performance.”