CALLUM McGREGOR admitted Celtic’s game plan was blown apart when Livingston scored early in the second-half on their way to their historic 2-0 success over the champions at yesterday.
Ryan Christie had seen red in the 25th minute following a high challenge on Scott Robinson and the Hoops knew they would have to regroup against a set of players well up for a battle.
The Scotland international midfielder told the club website: “We spoke at half-time about trying to dictate the play in terms of how we want to play the game.
“But they scored early and that got their tails up and gave them more oxygen in the game. That made it more difficult for us to get back into it.
”There’s no blame attached to Ryan at all. He’s been amazing for us this season and dug us out of holes plenty of times.
“It’s a bad tackle and you get that in football when you mistime things. We needed to show a reaction when we went down to 10 men and at times in the past we’ve done that and come away with three points.
ON THE BALL…Callum McGregor.
“But we never reacted as well as we should have.
“We’re massively disappointed. We knew it was going to be difficult with the pitch and their style of play, they get in about you.
“We didn’t perform and were left wanting a bit in that department in terms of second balls and really competing against their style.”
The Hoops struggled on the horrible surface and their task became even more difficult when Robbie Crawford was afforded far too much time to thread a pass through to Robinson whop walloped a right-foot shot beyond the exposed Fraser Forster.
Lyndon Dykes read perfectly the bounce of the ball on the artificial surface when he got between Kristoffer Ajer and Christopher Jullie to get on the end of a routine free-kick to lob in the second.
