THERE are some who swear the only way to alleviate disappointment is with a spot of retail therapy. Neil Lennon hopes they are right.

Frustration still lingers within the Celtic manager following his team's exit from the Champions League on Tuesday night but, rather than wallowing in self-pity, he has elected to take a proactive approach to making things better.

The transfer window reopens in a little more than four weeks and Lennon plans on getting his hands on the company credit card and doing a bit of shopping.

In the aftermath of Celtic's 3-0 home defeat by AC Milan, Lennon had outlined a need to "improve the squad we have now and improve our recruitment for next year" if the club is to become a regular participant in the group phase of the Champions League. To that end he hopes to target and sign players during the January window, not so they can help the club win the SPFL Premiership title this season - that is a virtual formality - but so that those players can be "bedded in" by the time the European qualifiers come around in the summer.

With that in mind, Lennon wants to make a head start, including revisiting some summer signing targets that fell through the net. "We need to look at bringing in better players for specific positions," he said, while revealing Biram Kayal will be out for six weeks with a broken foot.

"Certainly in the forward areas we need to spend a bit of money to be really competing next year again. We will be looking in January with the July qualifiers in mind. If we bring players in then we want to bed them in over a four or five-month period before the Champions League starts again in July.

"It's hard - January is harder than the summer - and you have to be careful not to push the boat too far out and overspend. We will be careful with that as we have been in the past. We were in for players in the summer, three or four strikers, and we got down the line with quite a few but the deals didn't materalise in the end and that was very frustrating.

"The Scottish league is a hard sell, there are so many more glamorous and more competitive leagues out there. But we will revisit some of the deals we didn't get done and see if we can reignite them again. It's important that myself, Johan [Mjallby, assistant manager] and Garry [Parker, first-team coach] get out and do more of that ourselves between now and then. I want to bring permanent signings in January, we'll try and avoid loans."

Celtic signed two strikers in the summer, Teemu Pukki and Amido Balde, but neither has made the impact expected of them. Lennon defended the pair and made the surprise revelation that Balde had been recruited only to play in domestic football rather than the Champions League.

"The two strikers, Pukki and Balde, at the minute are suffering a little bit of [a lack of] confidence, but I think when we work with them over a period of time they will get better," he added. "It's just a case of getting them bedded in and adapting them to the British game. Sometimes it takes time for these players to do that.

"Amido wasn't bought for the Champions League, he was bought specifically for the SPFL. As it happens we got into the Champions League but it's no disgrace on him that he didn't play as he wasn't bought for those reasons. He's only 22 and we want to work and make him better. We want him to improve. And he will play. We have a lot of games coming up between now and the Christmas period and the other side of January where I'd like to think he'll feature."

Lennon, whose team take on Hearts tomorrow in the William Hill Scottish Cup, had no regrets about the club not spending more in the summer as well as selling key assets Victor Wanyama, Gary Hooper and Kelvin Wilson. "Even if I had Hooper, Wanyama and Wilson there is still no guarantee we would have got through [to the last 16 of the Champions League]. There is no guarantee, even if we had spent £20m, that we would have gone through from a group like that.

"We have to be careful during times of austerity. The club are just watching the pennies at times and I think that's important because we have to look after the future of the club - not just the present."