Reality bites, Celtic learn the hard way that the high press doesn’t work at this level…unless you’re Dortmund

When you’ve been winning to the extent Celtic has of late, last night’s result is hard to compute.

When you’ve been watching guys who play with a swagger week in, week out, reduced to gibbering wrecks, it’s hard to compute.

But that’s the unfortunate reality of elite level European football.

This is what it does to you.

This is what happens.

Our confidence heading into this game was clearly misplaced.

Well, misplaced to the extent that it went AWOL after the eleventh minute.

The first goal of Karim Adeyemi’s hat-trick shattered whatever confidence Daizen Maeda’s equaliser had instilled.

But what I struggle to understand is how quickly our confidence was shattered.

How quickly our players became pub team level, and scythed apart at every opportunity.

Dortmund looked like they could score at will.

And if it hadn’t been for Kaspar Schmeichel, Celtic might have lost that game by 11 or 12.

It’s extremely hard to write anything about a game like last night’s, simply because there’s nothing positive whatsoever to take from it.

I could analyse it from start to finish, but I wouldn’t be doing anything different to any other blogger out there.

We all saw it, we all know what we saw, and analysing it isn’t going to change it.

So, I’ve decided to look at it from a different perspective.

Based on the form Celtic had going into last night’s game, you could say that last night was an anomaly.

A confluence of negative events where everything conspired against us, and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

But for me to call it an anomalous event would be disingenuous, because it wasn’t an anomaly.

It didn’t deviate from the norm when it comes to how we perform on nights like this.

Celtic simply aren’t anywhere near the level of a team like Dortmund.

We’ve often talked about fine margins in these games, but there were no margins at all last night.

A wily campaigner like Callum McGregor couldn’t string two passes together.

Greg Taylor was hooked at half-time, and the fact that a 19 year old came on to replace him was a damning indictment of his first half performance.

He proved categorically that he is not cut out for this level.

He has now been at fault for three of the eight the goals we’ve conceded in this Champions League campaign.

Greg Taylor is a top Scottish Premiership player.

And that’s it.

For five years now, the left back conundrum at Celtic is one that has never been adequately addressed.

It still remains unaddressed.

If ever the Celtic board needed a wake up call that it needs addressing urgently, then last night was it.

It should be absolute priority in the January transfer window.

Will it be, though?

I will forecast that the purchase of a new left back will be predicated on whether we are still in with a fighting chance of progressing in this Champions League campaign come January.

By which time, based on last night’s performance, Young boys will have nothing to play for, and you would expect that Aston Villa would already be comfortably through to the next round by then.

These are the last two teams Celtic have to play.

Our qualification could come down to those two games.

And both games could be meaningless to our opposition.

But not to us.

Earlier on, I said I would look at all of this from a different perspective, so I don’t want to get bogged down in last night.

Have a look at the below results from last night’s fixtures:

Celtic are now amongst the whipping boys of this new format.

Ourselves, Young Boys, Red Star, and Slovan Bratislava were all on the end of pastings.

None more severe than ours, though.

This is what you are up against at this level.

The teams who administered these hidings are the elite of the European game.

Borussia Dortmund’s frontline cost €200 million.

And there were we thinking we could compete because we spent £11 million on Arne Engels?

Reality bit us hard last night.

The disparity between us and these kinds of sides is off the scale.

It went further off the scale at Signal Iduna Park last night.

So, what can Celtic learn from this experience?

Be more pragmatic?

Don’t be so naïve?

Play more defensively, and try to catch them on the break?

All of the above would be sensible, but would these approaches result in us achieving anything at this level?

Look, I’ll put it this way, Brendan Rodgers has been a football manager for 16 years now.

He is a highly intelligent man.

He firmly believed we could use the high press against Dortmund.

But after 15 minutes of play, it was clearly evident that Dortmund were going to do the exact same thing to us that we do to teams in Scotland week in week out.

And they had ridiculous levels of quality to enforce that.

We didn’t, so you would think that Brendan Rodgers would see this and act accordingly.

Yet he didn’t, and what’s even more concerning is that he does not intend to change or alter his approach in these games.

This was what he said in last night’s post match interview:

Will we camp in and just wait? No, we won’t do that. We know it’ll be difficult at times.

Tonight, we just gave it away too easy and we got punished.

So, can we just expect more of the same in Bergamo against Atalanta in three weeks’ time?

You would think that right now, as I write, Brendan Rodgers has his Celtic players in a dark room, going through the torture of watching and analysing what happened last night, over and over again.

Every aspect of it, every single mistake, every ridiculously easy goal that Dortmund scored is going to hurt these guys.

They are professionals, and no professional footballer wants to lose a game in the way they did last night.

So yes, they can learn from everything they watch.

They can practice not making the same mistakes on the training pitch, again, and again, and again.

But if the manager is unwilling to change our approach, are we just presenting ourselves as cannon fodder once again for Atalanta?

Is there such a thing as taking the same approach, but eliminating all of the mistakes we saw in last night’s game?

You would have to think at that level, based on what we witnessed in Dortmund, mistakes are going to be unavoidable.

Atalanta are also purveyors of the high press.

So are we going to be in for another pounding, or an end to end slug fest?

It’s hard to know, but when Callum McGregor says that we will learn from last night, do you have faith in that happening considering we haven’t learned up to this point?

The kind of carnage we saw last night has happened to Celtic all too often in the past.

We mistakenly and naively thought we were ready for last night’s test.

Has this result shattered the confidence built up and banked to this point?

Are the players now questioning their respective abilities?

Surely Greg Taylor is doing some soul searching after his performance?

I suppose we’ll see the real results of that, and also the level of resilience our players have when we face Ross County at Dingwall on Sunday next.

We’ll either take out all the hurt we’re feeling on County, or we’ll struggle to pick ourselves up for a game like that.

Let’s hope it’s not the latter.

With an international break coming up, and two weeks of boredom, we do not need to be reflecting on points dropped in the league for that duration.

Either way, we have a lot of lessons to learn between now and October 23rd.

The question is, will we learn?

Or will Atalanta just prove to be another one of “those nights”?

Only time will tell.