There were no excuses from Graeme Shinnie as he reflected on defeat at Celtic this afternoon.

“We’ve come into the game in pretty good form. We won at Motherwell, beat Hibs at Hampden to reach a cup final, a good performance at PAOK, so that’s three positive performances in a row. Off the back of that, this is a sore one to take.

“Coming here, you know they like to start fast, they like to come at you and effectively try to win the game in the first 20 or 30 minutes. To be 2-0 up in 16 minutes is exactly what they wanted. It was such a slow start from us, but overall, the whole game we were not at the races. It wasn’t acceptable.

“We have had a gruelling schedule, that was our fifth away game in a row, but it’s no excuse for that performance. You can maybe tire towards the end but we looked lethargic from the start and you can’t blame that on fatigue. You can’t use the schedule as an excuse, because we want to be in Europe and in cup finals.

“It’s a brutal learning curve for some of the boys. We’ve been reminded here of where our performances need to be and we need to address that over the international break, recharge and be ready to go again against Rangers.

“It’s still relatively early in the season, the league is very tight, we’ve a couple of home games in hand, which aren’t easy games but we need to be strong at home and we need to win them. If we do, the table looks much better. There’s a long way to go. Last season we were 13 points behind third place come February and we still finished third. The focus is on the next game.”