Celtic step up their new season preparations with a trip to northern Spain tonight to face SD Eibar.
The Basque club are celebrating their 75th anniversary with Celtic the popular choice to mark the occasion.
With the second leg tie with Stjarnan to be negotiated on Wednesday Ronny Deila has taken a full strength squad to Spain as he continues to push his players towards peak fitness.
New goalkeeper Logan Bailly is likely to feature at some stage while Kieran Tierney and Jamie Lindsay will be hoping that they’ve not just been taken over for the journey.
Getting past the Icelandic champions into the third qualifying round is the immediate goal with the quality of opponents set to improve with either Azerbijan champions Qarabag or Rudar Pljevlja from Macedonia awaiting the winners of the Stjarnan v Celtic match.
Despite the distraction of the third round draw Deila isn’t looking beyond the return match in Iceland.
“First we have to get finished with this round and play a good game on Wednesday and then we can talk about other things if we do,” the Celtic boss said reacting to the third round draw.
“We had a lot of good movement and passing in the game against Stjarnan on Wednesday and I think we should have been more effective. But the result was good – I hoped that we would have won by more, but 2-0 is a good result when we go away.”
Slightly closer to home a Celtic XI will play Turriff United today with the match kicking off at 2pm.
let’s just take care of this game, and use it to get rid of any rust, before we start thinking of next game
Hopefully know injuries and some match fitness for the squad tonight, the result isn’t important !
HH
Griffiths MUST START EVERY game for Celtic……it really is that simple!
C’mon noo Ronny.