Liam Scales delivered a man of the match reaction to his prize-winning Champions League display on Wednesday night.
The Celtic and Ireland defender was selected as the outstanding player in the Bhoys’ thumping 5-1 win over Slovan Bratislava.
Scales opened the scoring after 17 minutes, while fellow Ireland star Adam Idah also got on the scoresheet when he netted late on, after his arrival from the bench. Kyogo Furuhashi, Arne Engels and Dalzen Maeda also got on the scoresheet for Brendan Rodgers’ side.
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However, it was the former UCD and Shamrock Rovers man who won the official Man of the Match prize - and he was keen to deflect quickly from his individual achievement.
“Obviously the team comes first and overall it was a brilliant team performance, but on a personal level it’s lovely to win that and I just want to keep going the way I’m going really.
“We have to recover now and get ready for the game against Falkirk.
“We know it’s a different challenge and we’ll have played three competitions in a week, so hopefully we can get the three wins. That’s the plan.”
Scales was delighted to get on the scoresheet too with his second European goal, three years after his first in the Europa Conference League for Shamrock Rovers, in their 4-2 defeat to Flora Tallinn.
“It was a brilliant three points. That’s what we really wanted and we wanted to start off the campaign like that.” he said. “The performance was brilliant, the scoreline was brilliant. So it’s all positives and we’re really happy.
“For my goal, the ball was perfect from Arne. He’s put it right in the area that we were told to attack, so all I had to do was stick my big head on it and hopefully it would go in and it did!
“It was a perfect ball, I’ve met it well and I’m happy it went in.
“And the atmosphere was amazing. I experienced it last year but it keeps getting better.
“It gave us the motivation to do what we did, and I think that once we played ourselves into the game, the fans got behind us every second and I thought it was brilliant.”
Scales was one of the stars of Celtic’s Champions League campaign last season when they faced Feyenoord, Lazio and Atletico Madrid, but failed to make it out of their group.
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