Following the defeat at Celtic Park, Jim Goodwin was understandably frustrated with the result, but quick to point to some positives too as he looked back on the game.

“We’re disappointed to lose the game. We knew it was going to be hard to come here today with the carnival atmosphere around the place, and we spoke about how minutes it was to keep it quiet for the first 15, 20 minutes. You look to create a bit of anxiety in the crowd but we didn’t do that. We couldn’t have started any worse, conceding a silly corner, and then we didn’t defend it properly.

“Coming to venues like this, giving Celtic a goal head start is not what you want, but the heads didn’t drop and for all they dominated possession, Kelle Roos didn’t have a lot to do. From there, we finished the first half the better, if Jonny’s chance goes in then who knows? The message at half-time was we were still in the game, but obviously at 2-0 with 15 minutes to go, it becomes very difficult.

“Celtic had lots of the ball as you would expect here, on their pitch with the international players they have. But our shape was good and they didn’t cause us too many problems and that makes conceding that early goal doubly frustrating. The second goal, that’s quality from Jota, that’s what £6million gets you. But the first one was avoidable and that is the real disappointment. We’ve got to be more aggressive to win that header, not let Welsh have it.

“You have to remember that plenty of the boys won’t have experienced an atmosphere like that before, but they stood up to it. We still tried to play out from the back, albeit not as well as we’re capable of, but you can be on the end of fours and fives here. Coming into the game, we believed we could get a positive result to build on the momentum from the cup games, but equally, the boys need to understand they won’t face this level of opposition very often up here.

“With respect to the other teams in the league that we’ll be coming up against shortly, they won’t put us under the same pressure that Celtic did. Celtic and Rangers with their financial capabilities are very different clubs to the rest of us, we are all aware of that, but we want to close the gap on them and I’m sure Hearts, Hibs and other want to do the same. We’ll learn from today but from here, now we move on and be positive about next Saturday.

“I thought we were ok, but ok won’t win you games here. We didn’t impose ourselves enough on Celtic, we turned over possession too cheaply at times, but we did a lot well. We are better than what we’ve shown today, we’re still coming together as a group, one or two guys like Miovski and Duk still need to get fully up to speed in terms of fitness as quickly as possible, but that will come. We still want to add some quality to the team to handle the ball better and hopefully we’ll be able to get further down the line on that in the next week.”