Celtic suffered further European disappointment as goals in each half earned Sporting Braga victory in a chaotic Europa League encounter at Parkhead.<\/p>\n
Home goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel had an error-strewn night and failed to keep out Ricardo Horta’s early long-range effort which stunned the Celtic Park crowd into silence.<\/p>\n
The Dane then did well to keep out a late shot but was helpless when the ball battered off Gabri Martinez in a botched clearance and rebounded into the net to seal all the points.<\/p>\n
This was a match Braga dominated for long spells in the first half, prompting home boss Brendan Rodgers to change his formation after the break in the hope that a back three and extra men in the middle might solidify his side.<\/p>\n
The Scottish champions showed improvement thereafter and thought they had equalised when Kelechi Iheanacho calmly slotted home after a mistake from the Braga backline.<\/p>\n
His celebrations were ended by referee Tobias Stieler blowing for handball, a decision backed up by a lengthy video assistant referee (VAR) check.<\/p>\n
Braga then had goalkeeper Lukas Hornicek to thank for two super stops as Celtic ramped up the pressure in search of an equaliser. He leapt to his left to keep out a Kieran Tierney header before hurling himself to the other corner to tip away Sebastian Tounekti’s curling effort which looked destined for the net.<\/p>\n
After the change of formation, Rodgers then threw on several substitutes, including Reo Hatate, Arne Engels and James Forrest, but no-one could conjure the quality to find the goal Celtic needed.<\/p>\n
Celtic started their European campaign hoping to make a mark on the Champions League. So sharp has been the drop-off since last season, however, that Rodgers’ side may struggle to qualify for the latter stages of the Europa League unless they can find their way again, and quickly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Celtic suffered further European disappointment as goals in each half earned Sporting Braga victory in a chaotic Europa…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-57758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}