Celtic not resting on laurels in quest to get better as team says thanks to one player at Hearts

Celtic have such a stranglehold on Scottish football right now, but captain Callum McGregor believes the team is far from the finished article.

Callum McGregor and the rest of his Celtic team-mates are striving to get better every day.

With the Viaplay Cup already in the trophy cabinet and holding a healthy nine-point lead at the top of the cinch Premiership, Saturday’s Scottish Cup trip to Hearts appeared – on paper, at least – to be one of the tougher assignments facing Celtic for the rest of the season. However, another excellent performance allowed them to ease into the semi-finals thanks to goals from Aaron Mooy, Kyogo Furuhashi and Cameron Carter-Vickers. You won’t find anyone at the club entertaining talk of the treble, but McGregor was happy to discuss the advancement of this team under manager Ange Postecoglou following their Tynecastle triumph.

“The football is always evolving, the players are understanding more and more about how to play the system and you can see them working it out even every day in training,” said McGregor. “We find different solutions to what we face in a game. You see them now starting to think ‘right, where do I need to be’ in relation to where the ball is.

“That’s the way we play football, you need everybody moving in relation and keeping the distances good to connect the game. As soon as you do that you have three guys at the top of the pitch with quality, pace, and who score goals. You can definitely see what we are trying to do coming together but by no means are we the finished article. We keep going and we always try and take the small details to learn and push ourselves as a group.”

The Celtic players said thank you to Joe Hart for this save from Toby Sibbick in the first half at Tynecastle.

Postecoglou makes sure that Celtic approach the season on a game-by-game basis, rather than looking at the bigger picture. The manager has become adept at batting away questions on how many titles Celtic could take this season. The players are the same. “Again, it’s the same message all the time,” McGregor replied when the notion of a treble was put to him. “We are never going to change our mantra in that sense. We believe that if we play our best game every time we go on the pitch we will be very difficult to stop. We just continue to work with that. The reason this group has got so much better so quickly is because of that. Every day in training we work so hard. We listen to the manager, we listen to each other, and we just keep trying to improve individually and as a group. And when we get the chance to play games we just try to come together and show all that and attack each game as it comes.”

There were many stand-outs for Celtic with their purposeful performance at Hearts, but one player in particular got the gratitude of his team-mates. Goalkeeper Joe Hart can often be a spectator for many of Celtic’s matches but his excellent reflex save from Toby Sibbick when the score was only 1-0 was a big moment in the match.

“Joe has done everything in the game and we are lucky to have him,” added McGregor. “To be a successful team you need a goalkeeper who’s going to make big saves at big moments and he did that for the team on Saturday. The lads all thanked him at half-time because I think we understood it was a big moment. It’s brilliant to have someone of that ilk and that personality in the group every day. He is always pushing the young lads and even the experienced ones as well, he has a really good strong core.”