A much-changed Celtic side delivered the perfect Champions League send-off, as Brendan Rodgers’ side head to Kazakhstan in search of a place in the Champions League.<\/b><\/p>\n
Three goals in 20 second-half minutes blew away Livingston’s stubborn resistance, with new Swedish signing Benjamin Nygren grabbing a double before Irish striker Johnny Kenny smashed home his first goal at Celtic Park.<\/p>\n
Nygren was particularly impressive, creating and scoring the first, cooly finding the top corner for the second, and generally being the catalyst for a big improvement after the break. <\/p>\n
When Kenny blasted in fellow substitute Daizen Maeda’s cross, a big smile broke across manager Rodgers’ face. <\/p>\n
The Northern Irishman made eight changes to the team who started against Kairat Almaty in midweek, including giving a debut and a first start for new Japanese signings Hayato Inamura at left-back and striker Shin Yamada. <\/p>\n
Stalwarts Reo Hatate, Kieran Tierney, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Callum McGregor, Daizen Maeda and James Forrest were all rested, although the latter trio were among several second-half introductions once Celtic had nudged ahead. <\/p>\n
Visiting goalkeeper Jerome Prior might feel particularly aggrieved to be on the end of such a scoreline, having pulled off an incredible stop just before half-time, leaping to somehow tip Hyun-jun Yang’s point-blank header onto the crossbar.<\/p>\n
Celtic’s attention now turns to an arduous journey to Almaty, where a \u00a340m shoot-out against Kairat awaits. <\/p>\n
That several senior players were either completely or partially rested, while keeping up Celtic’s 100 per cent start to the domestic season, will be music to the manager’s ears.<\/p>\n
As it will to his directors sitting in the Celtic Park stand, at whom the ‘sack the board’ chants died down once the home goals finally started to flow. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A much-changed Celtic side delivered the perfect Champions League send-off, as Brendan Rodgers’ side head to Kazakhstan in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4100],"tags":[94,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-367790","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115079342118460909","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}