Change of tack is required if Rodgers is to stem the tide

A team must find a way to keep out water or they’ll sink

RECORDS have become a feature of Celtic life under Brendan Rodgers. The domestic landmarks are positive and worth shouting about. In Europe, they take a rather different form.

The first unbeaten league season since 1897 came in the midst of a rare domestic Treble, only their fourth in 50 years. Last month, the British record of 63 domestic games unbeaten set by Willie Maley’s Celtic side of 100 years ago came crashing down.

In the Champions League, however, another story emerges.

The brilliance of Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain offers Celtic a rope to cling to when they find themselves adrift in foreign seas. But the Champions League allows no respite for the weak. A team either finds a way to keep the water out or they sink like a stone.

The life raft for Scotland’s champions is a likely place in the last 32 of the Europa League. Avoiding a heavy defeat to Anderlecht in a fortnight would deliver the key target of third place in Group B and European football after Christmas as one of the eight Champions League drop-outs. Yet progress has come at a price. To find their way to dry land, Rodgers and his team have endured some stormy nights.

Last season’s 7-0 defeat in the Nou Camp was the heaviest in Celtic’s European history. The 7-1 loss in Paris on Wednesday instantly became the second biggest, while a 5-0 capitulation to the gifted French side in September was the heftiest home defeat at Parkhead since 1895.

The quality of PSG is undeniable. The finishing of Neymar, Edinson Cavani and Kylian Mbappe was clinical and a joy to behold. PSG not only play a different game, they threaten to craft a new sport and the likelihood they will thrash wealthier teams from bigger leagues than the SPFL.

In five group games, the Parisians have scored 24 goals, a new record in the Champions League groups. That they’ve done it by riding roughshod over UEFA Financial Fair Play is a pitiful state of affairs. But they’ve also done it by riding roughshod over Celtic. Of the 24 goals scored, half have come against Scotland’s champions.

The way Rodgers sets about stemming the loss of blood on Champions League nights is Scottish football’s new ideological battleground.

Interviewed by BT Sport after the Paris mauling, the Celtic manager bristled at the notion he could be a little more pragmatic when it comes to defending.

‘I don’t know what you want us to do,’ he told the interviewer. ‘We played five at the back. What do you want, to play seven along the back? One midfield player, a goalkeeper and a striker? Sometimes you just have to take your hat off in terms of the quality.’

Would parking the bus have made the blindest bit of difference in Paris? The ease with which PSG scored their goals — aided and abetted by slipshod possession and defending — suggests Rodgers doesn’t have the players to do it in any case.

Scott Brown lost possession for the first. Mbappe was unmarked for an eternity for the fourth. Kieran Tierney couldn’t jump high enough for the sixth.

It’s comforting to point to the undeniable quality of the world’s most expensive forward line and ask: ‘What can we do?’

Yet the idea of Celtic meekly resigning themselves to defeats usually doled out to teams from Moldova and Liechtenstein is a tough one to grasp. Keeping Neymar and Mbappe out is fiendishly difficult, but it can be done.

Between scoring six against Toulouse and Bordeaux, five at Metz and Angers and four against Nantes, the French league leaders were held to a 0-0 draw at Montpellier and scraped a 2-1 win at Dijon thanks to a 90th-minute goal.

Wednesday marked the first time they had scored seven all season. To avoid losing 17 goals in four games against the pot one and two teams, Celtic have to become a harder team to beat.

‘They had an incredible night,’ said Celtic No1 Craig Gordon of PSG. ‘Everything they seemed to hit was going in at the posts. Their finishing was just brilliant.

‘We created a few chances ourselves and, while we put one away, we were not as clinical as them in the final third.

‘It’s an expensive front three and they make you pay. When they get the chance they put them away, more often than not.

‘They hardly missed the target all night. You just have to hope they have an off night, but when they don’t they are capable of doing what they did to us. They’ll do that to other sides, too.’

Nevertheless, PSG’s final three goals came in a five-minute spell and, for Celtic, a pattern emerges.

The French side scored two in two minutes in Glasgow. Study games against Barcelona, Astana, Hapoel Be’er Sheva, Molde and Fenerbahce and Celtic have lost clusters of goals in short bursts. It’s not just tactics and technique, then.

The composure Rodgers wants in order to play a passing, possession style from the goalkeeper forward also goes missing at key moments.

‘We could just kick it to them and let them come back at us that way,’ pondered Gordon. ‘That’s the debate.

‘Then you don’t have the ball and you’re trying to limit the damage from the start. You’re waiting to get beaten. You’d rather make a game of it and that’s why we play the way we want to play.

‘We gave away a few goals we were not happy with, but some of them were ridiculous quality. There’s not a great deal we could have done about them. It wasn’t enjoyable. But you have to accept they are possibly the best team in Europe at this moment. We want to challenge ourselves against these kinds of teams — but Wednesday was not the night. They were too good.’

Mercifully there are no PSGs in the Europa League. Facing the likelihood of being unseeded in the last 32 should they hold off Anderlecht, Celtic’s goal now is clear; to steady the ship and improve a record of one win from their last 19 group-stage games in UEFA competitions.

‘There will still be some excellent teams in the Europa League,’ added Gordon. ‘But if we put ourselves in the position to still be in Europe after the new year, then it will be a job well done.’

Celtic Champions League postmortems used to revolve around 3-0 defeats in places like Donetsk and Lisbon. In the aftermath of a Paris mauling a return to either in the Europa League would feel like a safe haven.