James McPake has vowed his Dundee players “will bounce back” after their miserable 6-0 thumping at the hands of Celtic.
The Dark Blues boss was hugely disappointed with the quality of his side’s defending and criticised Jordan Marshall’s late red card as “needless” with the score already 5-0.
However, he has backed his players to respond, insisting that forgetting about the defeat isn’t an option.
“We’ve had setbacks before and bounced back. We will bounce back,” McPake said.
“Our players are a resilient bunch but what we can’t do is paper over the cracks.
“We have to look at it, find out exactly where we went wrong and how we can be better.
“We have a long season coming up.
“We caught Celtic on a good day but they caught us on a bad day.
“We weren’t good enough as a team and we made some poor decisions.”
‘Needless’ red
The Hoops had come under fire for their performances in the early part of the season but their attack slipped into top gear against Dundee.
New signing Kyogo Furuhashi was impressive as he notched a hat-trick on his league debut with the Dark Blues unable to cope with the Japanese striker.
Tom Rogic and Anthony Ralston would add second-half goals before a penalty late on from Odsonne Edouard completed the scoring.
To add to their poor day, Marshall saw red for giving away the spot-kick as he dragged Liel Abada to the ground.
“It was needless, the game was gone,” said McPake.
“That comes down to decision making.
“Jordan is a very important player for us and we will now lose him for the Hibs game.”
‘Really poor’
On his side’s performance, the Dens boss said: “We were really poor. To get anything at a venue like this you have to be at the top of your game and hope Celtic have an off-day.
“We were nowhere near as good as we could be. To be fair to Celtic, I thought they were excellent.
“But defensively, as a team, we were really poor.”
He added: “On the flipside the one positive we can take is the performance of Shaun Byrne.
“He hadn’t trained, had Covid and had it bad.
“If anybody from Dundee comes out of today with any sort of credit it’s Shaun Byrne.”