Celtic midfielder Matt O’Riley has disclosed the united message in the dressing-room immediately after losing to Bodo/Glimt has he insists there’s a belief the tie can be turned around.
The Hoops’ 9-game winning run was snapped by the Norwegian champions at Celtic Park on Thursday night. The Norwegian champions came to Parkhead and produced a mature performance to take a 3-1 win back to Scandinavia.
It leaves Celtic’s Europa Conference League hopes hanging by a threat. And for supporters who watched Thursday’s match, there wasn’t much to take away from the game to suggest the second leg will be much different.
But that’s not the mentality the Celtic players had after the match as O’Riley bigged up our qualification chances. As quoted by the Scottish Sun, the former MK Dons man said: “We believe we can win this tie. We said it in the dressing room afterwards. We’re going to come back out and give it all we’ve got.
“It’s only one game, it’s only two goals difference and we’ve scored enough this season to know we can make that deficit up. So we’re not worried. We’re disappointed at the result, but we can go there, put in a performance and win the game.
“We’ve got a game against Dundee first which we need to win and I’m sure we’ll do that, then we’ll get ready for Europe. There’s a real belief in the team and I think the fans believe in us too.”
Celtic need to improve in so many areas to overturn Bodo/Glimt deficit
It’s always promising to see this level of confidence radiating out of the Celtic players. The fact this was a united stane in the dressing-room also pushes positivity at a stage in the season where we really need it.
Whether we qualify or not, of course, isn’t the most important thing. We can’t have any heads dropping when Dundee visit Celtic Park today. Ensuring we overcome the Dens Park side in comfortable enough fashion will be enough to show supporters that we can bounce back from disappointing setbacks.
When it comes to whether we can indeed qualify for the last-16 of the Conference League? There’s a lot of difficult work to be done in Norway for that to happen. So many aspects of our performance from Thursday night needs to improve.
Celtic need to be a lot quicker on the ball and much more inventive than they were on Thursday. The final ball needs to be of a much higher quality, whilst we have to be more tactically astute to avoid the Norwegian champions getting so much space in the middle of the pitch.
The problem now is that Celtic now need to go over there and batter Bodo. It’s not just a case of winning the game, but come the end of the tie we need to have won by 3 goals. Either that or win by 2 and emerge victorious in a penalty shootout.
There’s a lot that needs to improve. But at least we know the Celtic squad is confident about doing just that ahead of today’s crucial match against Dundee.
In other news, Celtic boss Ange Postecoglou clearly not a fan of Bodo/Glimt antics
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