Roy Keane made his monthly contribution to the deep realm of content creation on punditry duty for ITV earlier this week, casting his cold, beady eye over the various failures of British sides in Europe. Celtic did not escape Keane's glare, with their former midfielder criticising the club's mentality following the 7-0 shellacking in the Camp Nou.
Keane criticised Celtic's mentality, claiming the reaction to the defeat along with the level of celebration that accompanied qualification for the group stages was ill-befitting for a club of Celtic's grand stature. These comments are the latest in Keane's war on How Things Have Changed:
On one hand we're being told that Celtic are a great club with great traditions, great history - then they lose 7-0 to Barcelona and people say 'these things happen, it's acceptable'.
We spoke about the game there last weekend. They played against Rangers - one of the worst Rangers teams I've seen in a long time - who finished with 10 men for the last 10 or 15 minutes. I think the idea that they were tired - no [shakes head].
But even in qualifying, they were poor in the qualifying games. They scraped through. They didn't win any of their away games, I think.
The whole mindset has to change. Don’t accept, particularly away from home, being the whipping boys of Europe.
It’s Celtic, a huge club - they need to do a lot better.
When they qualified for the group the celebrations for me were way over the top. I actually thought they’d won the competition. People were hugging each other, the manager, the coaches the players.
I'm on about the qualifying games where they were scraping through; then celebrating the bloody thing - excuse my language.
Naturally, this pessimism/realism will hold no truck with silver lining's Brendan Rodgers, who has jumped to the defence of his players. In doing so, he has called Keane out over an apparent double standard, citing Keane's and Ireland's exuberant celebrations at qualifying for Euro 2016 following the play-off win against Bosnia:
Roy has seen what it means to achieve something. When they [Ireland] qualified for the Euros, that was an achievement. There weren't too many of the staff who stood not smiling, or hugging, or cuddling.
Where we are at, we went through six real tough qualification games. Until you actually come through it, until you experience what it means to people you can't imagine...
I am not talking Pemier League top end, we are talking a country here that has to fight for the right to be in qualification. The players have to go through a whole season and then six qualifying games [now talking about his Celtic squad]. The team they beat in the final qualification round was a good side.
They can go to the San Siro and win 2-0 [Hapoel Be'er Sheva] so they are no mugs. We won that.
I think the players have every right to celebrate, out of relief, out of ambition as players.
Some of these players may never be at Roy's level, but they have achieved something.
Rodgers is not the only man who has shot back at Keane over his Celtic comments. Straight-talking's Chris Sutton also took a pop earlier this week.
[Daily Star]
