“Back into the training ground, regroup, focus again,” Celtic star

Anthony Ralston reckons Celtic deserved to win the match against Dundee United at Celtic Park yesterday afternoon but reckons the players now need to dust themselves down, regroup than focus on the next match when Bayer Leverkusen arrive in Glasgow for the Europa League match on Thursday night.

The German side will feel that they are getting Celtic at exactly the right moment as Ange Postecoglou’s side struggle to get a run of form going. Yesterday saw the loss of the 100% home record in domestic football under the Australian whose away record has been pretty terrible it has to be said, and the tough games just keep coming, it’s Aberdeen away on Sunday!

It’s amazing to note that Celtic have scored just ONE goal away from so far in the Scottish Premiership and that came from an unlikely source…Anthony Ralston in the opening fixture at Tynecastle in the 2-1 defeat. Celtic have had two 1-0 defeats at Ibrox and Tony Macaroni Arena before trying to make it fourth time lucky at Pittodrie.

Ralston and his teammates – the ones fit enough to play – really need to get three points on the board at the weekend. The Europa League perhaps becoming a luxury we can’t afford this season, just like last year.

“I’m disappointed with the result, we obviously come into every game wanting to win, that’s our aim,” Ralston told Celtic TV yesterday afternoon after the dust had settled. “I felt that throughout the game we had our chances, but we need to keep clean sheets, and that’s not something we’ve done today.

“But, we’ll pick ourselves back up, we’ve got a big game coming on Thursday and we’ll get back to the drawing board.

“I felt we did enough to win the game, but there are areas in the game where we had to be in today, but we won’t get ourselves down. There are too many games coming up in quick succession.

“We need to be able to put this one behind us and go again. We go back into the training ground, regroup, focus again and, like I said, we’ve got a big coming on Thursday,” the Celtic right-back added.

“We’re disappointed with the result, we wanted to win, we’ve got a point, but we’re focusing on Thursday now and we go into that game head on.”