Celtic's Dundee troubles of their own making- Brendan Rodgers

Boss Brendan Rodgers insisted any concern in the latter stages of Celtic's 2-1 home win over Dundee was of their own making.

Published 17th Dec 2016

Boss Brendan Rodgers insisted any concern in the latter stages of Celtic's 2-1 home win over Dundee was of their own making.

The Northern Irishman, trying to manage a hectic fixture list which sees nine games in December, was forced into one change with captain Scott Brown suspended.

However, he made five changes in total with players who have not been regulars such as Ryan Christie - making only his second league start of the season - Cristian Gamboa, Gary Mackay-Steven, Nir Bitton and Emilio Izaguirre also coming into the side.

Striker Leigh Griffiths, who has also spent a large part of the season on the bench, scored with a fine free-kick and the one-sided game looked effectively over when Bitton added a second in the 56th minute with a shot from outside the box.

However, Dundee, who had packed their defence for most of the game, came out their shell and striker Marcus Haber reduced the deficit in the 68th minute to jangle the nerves among the home fans and with three minutes remaining substitute Faissal El-Bakhtaoui broke through the Hoops defence only to fire his shot over the bar.

Celtic moved 11 points clear of Rangers at the top of the Ladbrokes Premiership with two games in hand but Rodgers believes that level of advantage was put in jeopardy when they went 2-0 up.

The former Liverpool and Swansea boss said: I felt it was a good performance, we dominated the first half of the game.

I think it shows the respect that teams are having for how the players are performing, so 5-4-1 with the goalkeeper is 11 players behind the ball on half a pitch.

It is difficult to break down but I thought the players in the first half were very, very good.

We just missed the final action to get the goal and I was just making notes to tell them that when Leigh scores a great free-kick.

The problem came when we got the second goal and got a wee bit excited and started to come out of our positions.

We couldn't then press the game and then it became a game of basketball, they are on the attack, we are on the attack because we don't have control and they got the goal and it is 2-1.

You have to regain your composure again and we created some chances and they had a big chance but it was all of our own making.

But overall, with five players coming in, some who haven't played for a long time and without our skipper who is exceptional and Dundee having had a full week to prepare while we had a game during the week against Hamilton, I thought it was a very good result for us.

Not perfect but parts of the game were very good.''

Dundee boss Paul Hartley was left frustrated by El-Bakhataoui's late miss and the foul awarded to the champions by referee Bobby Madden for the challenge on midfielder Tom Rogic by skipper Darren O'Dea which led to the free-kick from which Griffiths opened the scoring, curling the ball past Scott Bain from 25 yards.

Rodgers revealed Rogic stayed inside at the break with an ankle injury which will be assessed on Sunday. Former Celtic midfielder Hartley said When you see him going through in the last couple of minutes you think he is going to hit the back of the net and he is disappointed in there.

I felt overall we had a good game plan and they didn't cut us open or get behind us too much.

I felt it was a good tackle. Players can't tackle nowadays without free-kicks again them. I felt it was a good tackle and he was booked for it which doesn't help.''