Tony Mowbray watched his side fight out a gritty 0-0 draw in Hamburg last night, yet the Celtic manager must now know that the ghost is almost up for his players in group C of the Europa League. Hapoel Tel-Aviv’s extraordinary 3-0 slaying of Rapid Vienna in Austria leaves Hamburg and Hapoel the runaway favourites in the section.

Celtic face the Israelis in Glasgow on December 2, and then Rapid in Vienna in their final game two weeks later. But Mowbray and his players now have to pray for a Hamburg collapse if Celtic are to advance to the tournament’s knockout stage.

Last night was doubly galling for Mowbray, given the four glaring chances his side created and missed. Scott McDonald, Georgios Samaras and Barry Robson were the culprits — either that or Frank Rost, the Hamburg goalkeeper, was heroic in his defiance.

“I have a frustrated dressing room right now,” Mowbray said afterwards. “Over the 90 minutes we feel we should have taken more. We should have been a goal or two up at half-time, having had some clear-cut chances, but it wasn’t to be. You have to take these chances when they come.

“It was a tight game. We could be sitting here having won 1-0, but that’s how these things go. Now we just have to try to go and win our remaining two games and then see what happens. What will be will be.”

Mowbray has come in for flak for his side’s apparent inadequacies in this second tier of European club competition, but last night he was keen to assert Celtic’s qualities.

“Every game we have played has seemed to me to be very tight,” Mowbray added. “You can take from that whatever you can. Other games have been won by big scorelines but the matches we have been involved in have all seemed to me to have been tight.

“The context here is, Hamburg are near the top of the Bundesliga [they are third]. They are no run-of-the-mill side, yet we more than competed at Celtic Park against them, and we did so again here tonight. But we know we will only be judged on results. The positive is that we competed well against a good side here tonight. The negative is that we couldn’t get the win.”

Of his side’s missed chances, Mowbray remained philosophical. “If we weren’t creating chances then it would be frustrating,” he said. “But we probably doubled our opportunities and shots on goal [in the group] tonight. We just have to keep going and keep believing, and getting into the right positions and hope that goals will come. If you keep getting these opportunities, it will happen for you.

“With the personnel that we had on the bench, we tried to go chasing the game. We brought on [Marc-Antoine] Fortuné and Niall McGinn to try to create space and go for it. We went chasing the game, and it was good to have Fortuné back from injury.”

Mowbray also hailed the performance of Lukasz Zaluska, who made a series of fine saves. “He has certainly done himself no harm,” Mowbray said. “I’ve said all this week that he is a very good goalkeeper.”