Strachan still confident

Celtic manager Gordon Strachan thinks his team can recover from their last minute 1-0 UEFA Champions League loss to Benfica today.

Strachan said: “It wasn’t easy to take,”

“But we’ve taken bigger blows and bounced back in the past, and I’m sure we will take even more in the future.

“I was proud of the heart, effort, determination and application, but tiredness beat us at the end.

“On the balance of application and heart, we deserved something from the game. In terms of chances, sometimes you get annihilated and manage to get a point.

“You need luck at times. If you don’t get it, you don’t get points. That’s what happened tonight.”

He added: “We are definitely not out of it,” he said. “A point tonight would have been excellent and it’s hard to take that we didn’t get anything. But we got through with nine points last year and it might take the same this year.

“This team has a lot of heart, I don’t have problem with that. At this level, however, you’re playing against fantastic technical players.

“Our biggest problem was giving the ball away. We need to work on that. If you don’t give it away, you don’t have to chase. That means you’re fresher - mentally and physically.

“We miss experience sometimes. We don’t have a lot of guys who have been there and seen everything at this level. So we need to try and gain that experience ourselves, so that people can look about at the squad and say ‘There’s McManus, McDonald, Donati, McGeady…they’ve all done it in the Champions League for years.

“Until we get to that stage, we need to hang and it see what happens. But we’re enjoying the experience of playing in this tournament.”