Brendan Rodgers said that Barcelona “beat you up with the ball” on a night on which he likened the Camp Nou pitch to an ice-rink, the game whizzing past his helpless players. Celtic fell to a 7-0 defeat but their manager insisted that there was “no embarrassment” and that he could not have asked for any more from his team.

“Professionally it is never nice when that happens,” Rodgers said, “[but] these are top class players and they have done that to much better teams than us.”

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Rodgers admitted that he felt helpless watching from the touchline as Barcelona sliced his team apart with five second-half goals. “The speed of the pitch is fantastic, the ball moves like it is on an ice-rink, it goes so fast – and they go as fast as that,” he said.

“Tonight was hard, but there can be no embarrassment. Whenever you lose as a professional it is tough to take but [my] players have been brilliant. They couldn’t have come to a more difficult place in world football after the highly intense game [against Rangers] at the weekend and to have hardly any preparation time against the world’s best at keeping the ball; they beat you up with the football at times.”

Rodgers had said before the game that Barcelona’s front three of Leo Messi, Luis Suárez and Neymar might be the best in history and he reiterated that view after a match in which they scored three, two and one goals respectively. “They are very special players,” he said. “You can put as many players as you want there – we had a line of five – but the movement, the speed and the touch can still make it very difficult for you. They have shown great quality this evening.”

He added: “When you’re on the other end, it is not so nice, but we can’t be too downheartened. It doesn’t matter if we’re playing Barcelona or Berwick Rangers, there’s still professional pride. But they are a team of top world-class players and this will not hamper us in any way. We have a lot of learning to do, we will recover, and the experience will be good for us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neymar and Lionel Messi celebrate during the game. Photograph: Hoogte/Rex/Shutterstock

This was Celtic’s 28th away game in the Champions League, of which they have now won just one and drawn one, losing 26. And while this was their heaviest defeat, Rodgers took some refuge in that record. He also repeatedly returned to the theme of tiredness from the weekend’s Old Firm game while Barcelona, he said, were “super fresh” having rested eight players, and lost, on Saturday.

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“Away from home Celtic find it very difficult over many, many years,” Rodgers said. “Our home games will be very important, where our supporters genuinely create an extra man for us.”

There may have been consolation too in the words of Barcelona manager Luis Enrique. “Whoever we had had in front of us today would have found it difficult against us,” he said. “There’s little they can do to stop it when we play with this precision.”