However the Greek striker who scored the goal that saw off Dinamo Moscow in the previous round has been honest in his appraisal of how he and his teammates contributed to Arsenal's 2-0 victory on Tuesday.
"If you see how we played and how many easy mistakes we made then it's difficult to win against a world-class team with world-class players,"
"Arsenal are always the same - even when they sell players the style never changes, just the faces. The way they pass the ball and look to go forward makes them one of the best teams in Europe."
"Maybe their goals were lucky, but in the end, with our performance, they deserved to win," the Greece international admitted.
"We can talk about the goals all we want, but the bottom line is we made errors. We were really bad and made a lot of mistakes and didn't play the way we wanted to play.
"The only thing now is to be positive and keep our heads up for the second leg."
Most people have said that Celtic played better out of possession than they did with the ball and Samaras agrees with this appraisal.
"When we didn't have the ball we did well because Arsenal struggled to create chances and find space," he remarked.
"In that way the plan worked.
"But when we had the ball we didn't have the ability to go on the counterattack and create chances and trouble their defence. We are upset at that because we can do it - we did it in the last round against Dynamo Moscow but not against Arsenal. It's an important lesson for sure."
Yours in Celtic
Clydebuilt