TONIGHT Suduva play Spartaks Jurmala to decide who gets to play Celtic at home next week. The Lithuanians (Suduva) are 1-0 up from the away leg so should be favourites to progress.
Celtic played them at the start of the UEFA Cup run on the road to Seville after we exited the Champions League to Basel.
Craig Gordon, who had nothing to do against AEK Athens except watch in horror as three times his team-mates gifted the Greeks goals, has warned his fellow Celts to cut out the errors in the Europa League.
“We can do well in the Europa League. But we need to get there first. It was always going to be a tricky tie no matter who we end up with and we have to make sure we’re in the group stages first before we start looking ahead.
“We’ve got to get back to winning ways in our next game. We have to ensure we win next week to get into the Europa League.
“It was disappointing against AEK. But we have to pick ourselves up and try to go on a winning run.”
Gordon reckons Celtic played well against AEK. Did they? There’s no doubt we were the better side in both games but that’s not the same as playing well.
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And while our defence was shocking our much praised forwards all had some time on the park in Glasgow and Athens to score against moderate opposition and all drew a blank. Leigh Griffiths had a gilt edged chance the other night to level the score in the first half but failed to hit the target.
His shot that scrapped the post on it’s way wide, can be compared to Chris Sutton’s against Basel in the closing minutes when Celtic were heading out at 2-0 down after winning 3-1 in Glasgow. Sutton’s effort – like Griffiths’ looked a goal all the way that night.
“We played well in the two games. We’ve had most of the possession, dominated the games but ended up getting beat,” Gordon said.
“We’ve lost bad goals in both games. We can’t deny that. As a team we’ve not managed to defend it and you can’t go pointing fingers.
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“Everyone’s back for free-kicks and we didn’t do our jobs. We lost two headers in a row and lost a goal for their second on Tuesday night.
“That’s disappointing. As a collective group we played the game fairly well. Tactically we were good and we passed the ball really well.
“We also created a few opportunities. Maybe not as many as we needed to but we played a good game. We just didn’t get the goals and their second goal gave us a mountain to climb.
“We nearly climbed it. The last 10 minutes we did really well, pushing forward. We just couldn’t create that second clear-cut chance for what would have been a winner.
“As I said I felt we felt we were the better team. We played better. But we’ve lost bad goals and it doesn’t matter how well you play in the game if you shoot yourselves in the foot like that and lose bad goals. In that situation you’re always going to be up against it.”
Gordon, predictably enough, refused to talk too much about the Boyata boycott of the match in Athens.
We just get on with our work. We gave everything against AEK, we gave our best to try to get through to the next round and we didn’t manage it.
“We came very close against a decent team. We feel as if we’ve come out on the wrong end of a result we should have done better in.
“We were just concentrating on the game, the guys who were here, and what we had to do to try to win. It was always going to be a difficult game having not been able to get the second goal last week.
“We knew what we had to do. Everything else that goes on behind the scenes is not really taken into account when the boys are focused on a game,” Gordon said.
But the goalkeeper did reveal that Boyata had been sending messages to his teammates in a group app.
“He (Boyata) might have put something on the group app. I’m not entirely sure.
“He certainly had an Instagram post in the morning of the game. It said he would be watching for our result.
“But it was up to the guys who were out there to go out and get something from the game to ensure we got through. We weren’t capable of that and that was very disappointing.”