In the open air of the Raiffeisen Arena, with bedlam all around, there was nowhere to hide for Celtic or Martin O’Neill.<\/p>\n
The Scottish champions had endured one of the darkest nights in their European history. <\/p>\n
After going out to Kairat Almaty on penalties last year at this stage of the Champions League play-offs, that is saying something.<\/p>\n
Four goals up on aggregate against LASK, O’Neill’s Celtic somehow conspired to implode in a second half with little sign of a response on the way to a 5-4 aggregate loss following extra time.<\/p>\n
There was no hiding place, and the Celtic manager was frank when put in the spotlight at full-time.<\/p>\n
“I’m responsible for this one,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Without a doubt. Naturally it took me a long time to get over the Uefa Cup final in 2003 but this was majorly disappointing. <\/p>\n
“In the context of things, one was a final which it would have been terrific to win, this was a qualifying game which we should have been able to get through.<\/p>\n
“We know that we are a million miles from the finished article. That’s absolutely true. I think we thought that anyway.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the open air of the Raiffeisen Arena, with bedlam all around, there was nowhere to hide for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":750013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-750012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/750013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}