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Let’s not kid ourselves- Callum McGregor’s trophy confession

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Callum McGregor has lived and breathed Celtic since his primary school days.

Before he had made his first team debut he won four SFA Youth Cups as the age criteria was pushed back.

While he has developed into one of the best Scottish midfielders this century he knows that the only currency in town is winners medals. The more the merrier.

After a flurry under Ronny Deila he came into his own under Brendan Rodgers, nailing down a place while Stefan Johansen, Nir Bitton, Stuart Armstrong, Tom Rogic and others competed to play alongside Scott Brown.

In the summer of 2021 much of the old guard moved on, last summer Bitton and Rogic joined them with McGregor and James Forrest the only links going back to the Invincible Treble that kick started a run of 14 trophy wins out of 18.

It sounds straightforward but last season a new identity was stamped on the club with the newly appointed skipper tasked with the job of ensuring that it was more of a handover than a transition. With barely a pause McGregor resumed adding to his medal collection.

8 minutes 30 seconds

I think when we first got together as a group last season the talk externally was that, ‘it’s a transition year, it’s a transition year’, but nobody was talking about that inside the building.

We were fully focused on trying to build this team as quickly as we could and, let’s not kid ourselves on, if we weren’t successful in the first season we might not be sitting here.

That’s the level of scrutiny that is at this club. You have to be successful and you have to win. We knew that when we were building a new team we had to win quickly.

That is just part and parcel of it. The guys that came in had to have that hunger and the guys were trying to prove people wrong and bring that success back to the football club.

I think when you bring that all together along with good players then hopefully more often than not you will be successful.

At big clubs you have to win, and especially in this country. If you are at a big club then you are under pressure to deliver success and every time a trophy comes around you have to win it and, if you don’t, it’s regarded as a failure.

That’s the pressure we live with playing at a big club, especially in this country. It’s just part and parcel of the game up here.

No matter how much trophy credit is built up the expectation at Celtic is for more, the next one.

McGregor revels in that pressure, on Saturday he can take a significant step towards his third trophy success as captain.

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