IF you are going to get a lesson in the dark arts of football, then you may as well get it from the masters. Atletico Madrid’s jaw-dropping Estadio Municipal could well be the Harvard of football’s dirty tricks, and how to deploy them while testing the boundaries of the rulebook.
Certainly, there was more than a whiff of orchestration about the way the entire Atletico bench sprung up in unison when Celtic winger Daizen Maeda went in late to a challenge with their defender Mario Hermoso, and how they then crowded referee Ivan Kruzliak to keep the pressure on him as he reviewed the incident at the VAR screen.
You might not like it, but you almost have to grudgingly admire how little they care about criticism of their approach, which places the need to win at all and any cost ahead of even the undoubted brilliance of players such as Antoine Griezmann.
If the Champions League experience for Celtic is to be a learning one yet again this season, then they picked up another valuable pointer even in their 6-0 defeat to Atletico. According to defender Liam Scales, it was a bruising education, but one where their own naivety was exposed.
Celtic will never adopt the full Diego Simeone tactics under Brendan Rodgers, but Scales thinks they do need to develop a slightly nastier, more cynical streak.
“We are a young team and maybe a bit naïve at times,” Scales said.
“You come and play in Europe and the referees, you get nothing out of them. They are a lot stricter and tackles that you might get away with domestically, they give.
“With VAR, you are going to pick up red cards in the way we’ve been doing.
“It’s frustrating, because I think with 11 players on the pitch we had started the game quite well.
“I know we had conceded earlier before the red card, but I thought we had quite a bit of the ball, and it definitely would have been a more even game with 11 men.
“To be honest, you see the way they react and all of their staff are up off the bench. It definitely doesn’t help.
“The VAR screen is right beside their bench as well, and [the referee] was probably feeling the pressure.
“They are definitely more street-smart than us, that’s for sure, the way they influence the referee.
“It’s not the nicest part of the game, but it helps them win games and we could definitely learn from it.”
Inevitably, the manner and the emphatic nature of the defeat to Atletico has sparked debate over whether Celtic really belong at such a level, but Scales rejects the notion that the Scottish champions are out of their depth when they are thrown in at the deep end.
“Well, we got a result at home against them, you know?” he said.
“I think we’re at the level, it’s just naivety and poor decisions at times have let us down.
“Some of the goals, we could have defended better, we need to look back on that and see what we could have done better defensively.
“But it’s still difficult with 10 men away from home to get results at any level, and especially there.
“It was extremely difficult. They are a quality, quality side.
“It’s tough enough to go there with 11 men, but 10, and having our backs against the wall for that long…with the quality of players they have and the amount of attacking they were doing, they are going to score goals.
“Some of the goals they scored were outstanding, so we’ve just got to take it on the chin and move on, there’s nothing we can do about it now.
“We’re just looking forward to the next one because we know we can still pick up points in this group and do well.”
Amazingly, Celtic can technically still qualify for both the knockout stages of the Champions League or – more likely, but still a long shot – the Europa League, which is the consolation prize for finishing in third place in the section.
Scales takes solace and hope from the way Celtic performed in the opening three games of Group E, as well as those lessons from Madrid, to give him belief that Celtic can win in Rome against Lazio next time out and stay in the hunt.
“There’s a few games left in the group and now it’s just about bouncing back and doing as well as we can, because the Lazio game was so tight and it could have gone either way, and we feel that we can go there and get a result,” he said.
“It’s the same with Feyenoord at home. We were doing well in Feyenoord up until the couple of red cards, and the same happened here. I think we just have to bounce back, that’s it.
“You need to learn from these things at this level, because teams are so ruthless and if you don’t learn then the same things are going to keep happening in these games.
“You might feel like you maybe could have gotten a result. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but in a couple of the games in this campaign I feel like we could have got something out of them.
“Ok, not on Tuesday night, but we just have to learn from this, take it in to the next two games and really have a go at it.”
