BRENDAN Rodgers has leapt to the defence of Cameron Carter-Vickers following the Celtic centre half’s late mistake in the agonising Champions League defeat to Lazio last night.
The Scottish champions were just seconds away from recording a draw with their Italian rivals after performing superbly in the Group E encounter at Parkhead.
However, Carter-Vickers, who made his return from injury when he replaced Nat Phillips in the second-half, was dispossessed by substitute Pedro Rodriguez in the fifth minute of injury time.
And replacement Pedro then headed a Matteo Guendouzi cross beyond Joe Hart to earn the Serie A side a narrow 2-1 victory.
But Rodgers, whose men are in bottom spot in their section after two outings, has insisted the centre half was not at fault for the painful reverse.
“It’s a poor goal from our perspective,” he said. “Clearly we want to win every game that we play. There was maybe that mindset that we have control of the ball and we are running out of position. That’s just the idea of wanting to win the game.
“But it’s a level where it was a really good cross and a fantastic header by Pedro. But if I look at it from our perspective we can negate the goal just by our positioning. That was the only disappointment from our perspective.
“The learning from it as a team is don’t be coming out of the space until you’ve got control of the ball and control of the game. But there was lots of really good stuff to take into the next game.
“Overall I think we played some really good football at times. We had control and were playing through the lines in midfield and got into good areas but we didn’t quite get a result to match.”
Meanwhile, Rodgers, whose side dominated the encounter with Maurizio Sarri’s team, has refused to rule out Celtic qualifying for the knockout rounds of the Champions League or the Europa League even though they are now four points behind Atletico Madrid and Lazio and three adrift of Feyenoord.
“We were under no illusions coming into this competition about where we sat,” he said. “I said at the beginning that our idea was to qualify for European football and that will still be the ambition and still be our mentality.
“We have shown over the two games against good sides that we can compete. We just have to tidy up on one or two moments in the game and maybe get a little bit of luck go our way. We will still fight in every single game to get that qualification.”
Rodgers added: “We’ve been right in both games. For the first hour in Feyenoord we were very competitive and if we had made some better decisions we could have been in front. But we showed we can compete.
“Then last night, we were very unfortunate to lose. But we showed our quality in the second half and played some really good football.
“But it’s a harsh lesson for us to have to take. We’re playing against some fantastic teams in this tournament but we are here to compete. Unfortunately we didn’t take what we deserved from the game. But we’ll look ahead to the next one and keep fighting in every single game.”
