Brendan Rodgers says Celtic are ‘really positive’ about Karait play-off tie | OneFootball

Brendan Rodgers insists winning is the only thing on Celtic’s mind as they prepare for a £40million shootout with Karait Almaty on Tuesday night.

The Hoops’ Champions League hopes are in the balance following the goalless draw in the first leg of the play-off at Parkhead on Wednesday night.

With a 7000-mile round trip to Kazakhstan in mind, and with the huge financial prize at stake for the winners, Rodgers made eight changes for the visit of Livingston in the William Hill Premiership on Saturday.

With most of his heavyweights starting the game on the bench, a second-half double from wide-man Benjamin Nygren and a strike by substitute Johnny Kenny secured a 3-0 win that left Celtic with nine points from nine and ready to turn their attention quickly to Europe.

The Northern Irishman told Celtic’s official YouTube channel: “We are really positive. I think we go and we make sure our preparation’s right over the next 48 hours.

“We’ll go out there and take all the preparation that we need to do on the plane and everything else.

“Like I said, we’re there to win the game.  The objective is to qualify.

“We’re still well in the game and we’re still well capable of going out there and winning. So that’s the plan.”

Livingston diligently kept Celtic at bay in the first half although they were helped by keeper Jerome Prior’s incredible save from Hyun-Jun Yang point-blank header.

However, when Nygren opened the scoring just two minutes after the restart, the game changed in Celtic’s favour.

Livi boss David Martindale said: “I was pretty confident he was offside in the first phase, so I didn’t put a lot of relevance on the save,

“I went back to the iPad and watched it and realised he was onside and it suddenly became an outstanding save.

“Jerome’s got that in his locker and I think when you come to games like this you’ve got to carry a wee bit of luck at times as well, but I felt we limited Celtic to very little in the first half.

“Jerome comes up with a big save, but we never caused them any problems at all at the top end.

“Second half, we’ve got a game plan and then you lose that quick goal, which actually comes from us being out of shape.

“Then we change our shape to try to get in the game and I think the change in shape really helped us offensively in terms of getting into the opponent’s half, getting box entries.

“But I think it kind of hurt us a wee bit defensively.”