Alistair Johnston arrives at Easter Road. Hibs v Celtic. 22 February 2025.Photo: Vagelis Georgariou (The Celtic Star)
Q: First of all, we’ll start with the game on Saturday and just the reaction to that. What did you make of the performance and where do you think it came from, especially the first 45 minutes?
Alistair Johnston: “Yeah, we came out of the blocks a little slow, and when you go to Easter Road, it’s a crowd that can get really lively and they’re a good team. I mean, they’ve picked up in form since the beginning of the season. They’ve been really strong, I think, especially the past couple of months. We knew it was going to be a difficult game and obviously we got off to a horrible start and giving up a pretty soft goal. But no, credit to them. They gave us a difficult match. It was a frustrating one to concede a second one as well just before half-time. It gave us quite a lot of work to do in the second half.
Callum McGregor, Hibs v Celtic. 22 February 2025.Photo: Vagelis Georgariou (The Celtic Star)
“I thought we had a much better performance in the second half. But again, when you leave yourself that much to do away from home, it can be really difficult. So no, fair play to them, they got the result. We’re just going to move on from it. It’s one of those ones, you know, those kinds of games unfortunately can happen. But we’ve been pretty strong this year about limiting those. And if, you know, we start off with a bad spell, we normally can, you know, nip it in the bud pretty quick. But that one got a little out of hand for us.
“We let it kind of drift through the entire first half. So that’s a frustrating thing. But we’ve learned from it and we’re ready to move on. And again, we’re lucky we got another midweek game. So no real time to dwell on it.”
Q: Yeah, is that the key answer? That when the club have had very few setbacks this season, but when they have come, you’ve managed to just almost just ignore it and go again.
Alistair Johnston: “I think that’s a sign of a team that’s competing for titles. You need to have that. You need to have a short memory. Because again, if you dwell on things too long here, the games just come so thick and fast that you can really kind of spiral out of control a little bit if you get yourself caught up in that. So we do a really good job of that. The manager is very good at keeping us in line and making sure that the messaging is right to the players in terms of, what we need to focus on, and what we need to refocus on.
Hibs v Celtic. 22 February 2025.Photo: Vagelis Georgariou (The Celtic Star)
“And also knowing when something was going wrong. There’s a reason why we lost that match. Okay, what can we dissect from that game? What do we need to get better? But at the same time, not treating it like it’s the end of the world. So I think that we’ve done a really good job of that so far this year. And it’s going to be really important in this run in here, the next couple of months, to keep that same kind of mentality and that same focus so that we can run through the finish line, sprint through it, ideally.”
