Celtic captain Callum McGregor and Danilo Pereira da Silva of Rangers during the Scottish Premiership match at Ibrox. theRangers v Celtic, photo O’Rourke/Shutterstock
Q: How is the mindset? Are you still stung a bit by what happened on 2nd January? Does that play into what you’re preparing this week?
Callum McGregor: “No, not at all. Obviously, there’s been a lot of football played since then on both sides as well. Changes to managers, etc. So we have to take the game in isolation. We have to prepare the way that we want the game to be played. Obviously, as being at home, we’ve got to try and maximise that as much as we can. And then we’ll see what (the)Rangers do when they turn up and their team comes in. We’ll see what we’re looking at there. But our preparation always stays the same. We train with a calmness and there’s a calmness going into the game. We know how we want to perform. We know what we need to do in the game to make it a success. So we try and bring all those elements together on Sunday.”
Daizen Maeda of Celtic scoring during the Scottish Gas Scottish Cup Quarter-Final match between Celtic and Hibernian at Celtic Park on March 09, 2025. (Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)
Q: You can probably see the benefit of it last week, the full week’s training, the way you flew out the traps at the start. Is that the key to starting this week as well?
Callum McGregor: “Yeah, I think these games are important. Especially the home team starting well. If you can get on top of the game, the crowd come with you and it’s an amazing atmosphere. So we’ve had a lot of good experiences at home in that type of situation and starting the game in that manner. We’ve scored a few early goals and we’ve set the tone early in the game. So you have to try and maximise all of that. Like you said, a sort of freshness about the squad last week was probably as good as we’ve been for a while. Hunger, willingness to run and freshness. Get inside the pressure, get the ball back and Hibs struggled to live with that. So if we can bring a similar level of performance, then we hope that that’s enough to give us a good day.”
Q: When this fixture comes around, you can often say how defining it could be for the title. But that’s not going to be the case this season. But that won’t deter the hunger within the squad, will it?
Callum McGregor: “No, not at all. I think coming out of the last game, we felt that as well. Of course, the points difference was roughly the same probably. Which again shows how well we’ve bounced back. We’ve got ourselves in a really strong position again. But the feeling for us after the game was we never did ourselves justice. So we feel like this time around, we’re at home, we understand what the game means. Like I said, we didn’t do ourselves justice. So we want to come off the pitch first and foremost, feeling good about what we’ve done in the game and the performance and what we’ve given to it. And generally, if we do all those things, then we’ll win the game. And that’ll put us in a much better place. But I think the starting point has to be when we come off the pitch, we don’t feel how we felt at Ibrox last time.”
