Celtic will need their most experienced players and dressing room leaders to come to the fore over the coming days after the shock Scottish League Cup exit at the hands of Kilmarnock.
Let’s be honest, we’ve been lucky enough as supporters to avoid days like today for the vast majority of the last decade, but defeats still sting and everyone is waiting to see how Celtic rebound.
Captain Callum McGregor has been in this position a few times at Celtic and he hasn’t shied away from the reality of his and his squad’s situation. For the midfielder, the team are at a crossroads and he’s called on the players to find something within themselves and spark the season into life.
McGregor said [Sky Sports]: “That’s what you get with a new group in their infancy. If you remember back to two years ago when we lost to Livingston, it was much the same. Now we are at a crossroads in this group as well. We have lost a lot of key players, a lot of big players for us, so we have to find a new team. We have to find a settled team and then go back to the principles that make us a good team.
“You will get bad results and it’s how you handle that, how you stand up and be counted in the coming days and weeks. Again, it’s just reinforcing the work we are doing on the training ground. Trying to settle everybody as quickly as we can, settle into the pattern and the rhythm that we want to play.
“It’s just repetition in training and trying to find that balance really, really quickly. With this result we all have to realise that we have to go pretty quickly. It was similar at this point two years ago when we put ourselves under pressure. Now you have to react, you have to find something within yourself and within the team and within the group that sparks us into life. Because that’s what we need to do now.”
No messing from McGregor, then. It would have been easy for him to downplay yesterday’s result, chalk it up to a one-off. But there’s none of that here – and rightly so.
There is no panic, but the captain is trying to ensure that a bad result doesn’t roll into a second and third one over the next fortnight. Things like that can happen if a squad doesn’t contain the characters needed.
We’re all now looking forward to seeing how the Bhoys respond on the pitch this weekend at home to St Johnstone, with many fans also keen to see the club ramp up transfer activity. This time next week hopefully we’re all feeling a bit better.
In other news, Brendan Rodgers comments suggest a different profile of signing could be on the way at Celtic.
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