Celtic were knocked out against Midtjylland a week today, but it hasn’t stopped Carl Starfelt from being ever the optimist about what could happen in his time at Glasgow Celtic.
The Swede joined Paradise just three weeks ago from Rubin Kazan in a £4m deal, and having just come out of quarantine, started against Hearts at the weekend. Inexplicably, the Hoops lost, but in an interview with The Herald, Starfelt won’t let the poor performance deter him in his bid well – with the end goal of being able to play for Sweden again.
Of course, it is a big goal for me to win a spot in the national team. If you are playing at Celtic and you are being successful there when you do, it will look good for me in terms of that.
You have seen from the times before that Swedish players who do good when here at Celtic are able to play regularly for the Sweden national team. So, of course, that also makes it a goal for me to do the same thing.
Starfelt is talking about none other than Mikael Lustig, Johan Mjallby and, of course, Henrik Larsson. The King of Kings made his name at Celtic, resulting in him becoming one of Sweden’s most capped players ever – something which Starfelt won’t beat, but all he wants is to pull on the yellow jersey more often.
The Euros have just passed, but if he succeeds in a Celtic shirt – especially in the European games – there is no reason Starfelt can’t make the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Dwelling on his chance in Europe enhancing his reputation, Starfelt claims he is ready to fit straight in against Jablonec.
As for the two qualifying Champions League games, I think Celtic was the better team in the matches against Midtjylland. We didn’t go through to the next round there in the end, but we played decent football in the games.
I played in the qualifying before, but I don’t have too much experience with European games. Of course, it is still football, so I think it is too big a difference and some of the boys here at Celtic have played a lot of games in Europe in their careers. At the end of the day, it is still just football.
He will need to improve 100% on his performance against hearts to have any chance of winning caps.