Robinsons hails team’s character as they secure ‘deserved’ point
Motherwell manager Stephen Robinson felt his side deserved a draw after losing captain Peter Hartley and Liam Donnelly to injury in the early stages, and requiring Mark Gillespie to produce a superb double save when Celtic got a 39th-minute penalty, writes Andrew Smith.
Danny Johnson grabbed the 88th-minute leveller to cancel out Ryan Christie’s early goal and Robinson said: “I thought we showed a real amount of character to go and press Celtic high up the pitch. You are always at risk with the quality they have, they can pick you off, but I thought we were disciplined and organised. They showed a little bit of quality and I think we deserved a point in the end.
“When you lose a player and they score when we are down to 10 men you think ‘is it going to be one of those evenings again’.”
Manager Brendan Rodgers lamented the performance level of a much-changed team as Celtic missed out on the opportunity to return to the top of the table.
He defended his decision to make seven changes from Sunday’s Betfred Cup final winning starting XI, but conceded it affected standards.
“Not a very good performance,” said Rodgers, with Scott Brown, Cristian Gamboa, Jonny Hayes, Olivier Ntcham and Griffiths among the changes.
“It was a game that we didn’t play well in – in particular the first-half. We scored a good goal and then didn’t take the chance with the penalty and also had a good goal ruled out from Filip Benkovic. At that stage I wasn’t so happy with our positioning and level of our game. In the second half our positioning was better but we were still too loose. Then of course if you don’t take chances you are vulnerable at the end of the game.”
Saturday sees top-of-the table Kilmarnock visit Celtic Park and Rodgers added: “Kilmarnock have played a couple more games than us but it’s still really good for them to be up there and it makes the game at the weekend very important for us. It’s still very early. I look at the performance.”