Ange Postecoglou has warned his Celtic side to shape up on the road or forget about challenging for the title.
The Hoops slumped to their third away defeat of the season after crashing at Livingston – and the club are still without a victory on the road since Valentine’s Day earlier this year.
Postecoglou admitted Celts were miles off it in West Lothian as he branded the ‘terrible’ display one of the worst of his short spell in charge.
And he is well aware the Parkhead men need to get their act together on their travels.
Postecoglou said: “Does something have to change away from home? If we play like today, then yes. In the other away games we were well in the games and played well.
“But you know what? If we don’t get results away from home then we can’t be successful, so that’s still got to change.
“Irrespective of what I think about performances, we’ve still got to get the results, and that’s the reality of it.
“Until we tackle that in the right way, then we’re going to have this problem.
“Our front third play was poor, it was probably the poorest it’s been all year.
“We’ve obviously had some issues defensively, but I just thought today in the front half we were terrible.
“That was everybody, not just the strikers or the attacking players, we lacked a real conviction in going forward to be positive.
“That falls on me to get it right.
“It was disappointing. We started the game very sterile, we didn’t really take the game to them.
“We wanted to just ease our way into the game and when they scored we’re obviously chasing the game.
“Our football was ok, we created some chances, but our decisions in the final third were really poor.
“We ultimately paid the price for not applying ourselves as we should.
“I don’t think you should learn from it, you already know what you’re going to get going into it.
“It’s just a disappointing day for all of us, and it’s my responsibility to make sure that moving forward we don’t allow these sort of situations to happen again.”
Celts couldn’t get going on the back of Thursday’s Europe League defeat to Real Betis in Spain and they were missing several key players.
But Postecoglou said: “I think if you start looking for those kind of excuses then you fall into a trap.
“The problem was we didn’t start the game well, and that’s my responsibility, maybe in the way I prepared the team and maybe the way we prepared for this game wasn’t right.
“But if we started the game as we normally do and put the opposition under pressure then we wouldn’t have got ourselves in the hole we did, and once we got ourselves in the hole we didn’t really have a great deal of solutions to get ourselves out of it.
“Credit to them, they defended well and their keeper pulled off some good saves, but we shouldn’t have been in that position.
“It’s not the form, it’s the results. Our performances have been good.
“Today is disappointing because you come here knowing it’s not going to be an easy game and you’re going to have to go beyond just trying to play some football.
“We lacked that spark at the start of the game. I just felt we fell into the trap of maybe thinking that this kind of game with the challenges it has, our football would find a solution through that.
“That was never going to happen, we needed to earn the right.”
Postecoglou staged a surprise by bringing Boli Bolingoli in from the cold at Livi after a year on the sidelines following his Covid rule break last August.
He said: “Boli has been training well and we thought it was a good game to give him a start with Greg going down and Monty playing 90 minutes the other night. It was a big ask to ask him to start, and Liam Scales isn’t quite ready yet.
“We gave him an opportunity today, he’s been training well.
“I’m not big on learning curves. I don’t think we learned anything today we didn’t know before the game.
“My responsibility, and it is my responsibility, lies in making sure the team is prepared well irrespective of the opponent.
“We’ve got the cup game (against Raith Rovers) on Thursday, which is important for us, so we’ll focus on that and make sure we prepare well.”
