Celtic’s Problems with a Parked Bus spoken about Internally

Callum McGregor looked back on Wednesday night’s frustrating draw at St Mirren and admitted that the Celtic players have had a discussion about the goalscoring situation, particularly against the teams that opt to park the bus against Celtic. You can’t really blame them as first Livingston and now St Mirren have shown it’s a tactic that earns them points.

“It was really frustrating,” the Celtic captain admitted. “We had enough opportunities, balls flashed across the face of goal, enough chances in general to win the game. It’s a little bit like where we’ve been at recently. We’ve managed to just get over the line in certain games of late. We just need to be more ruthless. When these chances come we need to take them.

Speaking on the official Celtic website the Celtic captain added: “You look at all the ball we have, we have been dominating games for a long time now and creating so many chances. We need to take them as well. We’ve spoken about it internally. We shouldn’t need 10 chances to win a game. One or two should be enough.

“The way teams are setting up against us now, it’s more than likely that we’re going to need to get one or two to score and get your points. It’s something to work on in training,” McGregor stated.

The injury crisis hadn’t affected Celtic in terms of points dropped until midweek when with three wingers leading the line, one from the Celtic B team, Celtic just couldn’t find a way past the two banks of five that St Mirren had protecting their goalkeeper. On a needs must basis surely it would have been worth throwing someone like Cameron Carter Vickers up front to contest the scores of cross balls coming in from the wings?

“There’s no bones about it, we are struggling for bodies,” Calmac said. “But we are not a team that wants to go down the road of making excuses. When someone gets injured, it’s an opportunity for other players. That’s the way we have to look at it. Losing quality players does affect you and what you are trying to do. But we don’t want to go down the road of making excuses.”

The Celtic captain is a long way from throwing in the towel, despite dropping six points behind theRangers. There is plenty of football still to be played and if Celtic keep winning then we’ll be champions.

“We can’t get too carried away and focus on the one result. We’ve been winning games for a long time now and we’ve been consistent over a period of time. We’ve been looking like the team we want to be.

“We want to add a bit of quality to that in the moments we need. But it’s been a good body of work over the period so far, in terms of where we started to where we are. We need to stay calm and stay focused.

“In football, if you ever need a reminder of what the game can do, that was it the other night. You go from Sunday to that. But we know exactly where we are as a group and where we want to get to. There’s still a lot of work to do to get there.

“Do we want to go in to the break on a high? Absolutely. We’ll dust ourselves down. St Mirren was obviously a disappointing result, but, psychologically, it doesn’t change anything too much. We still want to go out on a high and then we know how important the games are when we start back. We want to rectify the other night come the end of the month.”