Callum McGregor's Honest Assessment of Celtic's Performance

Callum McGregor did not bother with sugar-coating.

“I think the difference between the two sides was you’ve seen a team and then you’ve seen a team of individuals,” the Celtic captain said, the words landing as hard as any tackle. “Rangers were a team and you could see that. We looked like a team of individuals that wanted to do our own thing and play when we got the ball, not necessarily run when you don’t have the ball.”

At Ibrox, Celtic were exposed. Not by a moment of brilliance or a freak decision, but by something far more damning: effort, or the lack of it. McGregor’s verdict was ruthless, and it was aimed squarely at his own dressing room.

“That’s the one thing you can’t do when you come here is just don’t run. You can’t defend with six players, it’s impossible. We’re trying to get the message to everyone that we have to be a team.

“We have to be the team that we want to be. We need to find a way to do that quickly because we lost a big game in LASK. We lost another big game today and it’s not acceptable.”

This was not a captain looking for excuses. This was a captain warning that standards at Celtic are being shredded in real time.

“If we want to be a good Celtic team then we have to win the big games,” McGregor continued. “That’s one thing we’ve always done is win big games and turned up when it mattered. So far this season we’ve been bitty in games and we need to fix it.”

The manager had called the result and performance a wake-up call. McGregor’s response cut through that notion. How many alarms do they need after the Champions League collapse in Linz against LASK?

“We’ve put ourselves under pressure,” he admitted. “We need to respond on Thursday and we need to respond on Sunday.”

Celtic supporters can live with bad days. They can live with missed chances, with off-nights, even with the odd tactical misstep. What they will not tolerate is a team that looks like it has stopped running. Players may happily collect hefty salaries at the end of the month; the least they owe in return is maximum effort, especially in games that define seasons and shape legacies.

McGregor did not spare the collective. “We were poor in pretty much every area of the game,” he said. The only honourable exception, by common consent, was Colby Donovan, probably the lowest-paid player on the pitch yet one of the few who looked like he understood what it means to wear the shirt.

“Once we went behind in the game we never looked like we were recovering really to be honest. We had a couple of good moments early on.

“If we take them it’s a different game. And we know that coming here you’re not going to get hundreds and hundreds of chances. You get moments in the game where if you take them it can totally change the outlook of the game. I felt like once we went one behind then we never really looked like getting back in it to be honest.”

The honesty was brutal. Celtic, by their captain’s own admission, folded. After the third goal, the contest was gone. The mindset changed from comeback to damage limitation.

“You don’t want fours and fives for sure,” McGregor said. “As soon as the goal went in, then I’m saying to Cam and Scalesy, ‘Look, no more goals, we have to just tighten this up’.

“Of course, we always want to get back in the game. And we always want to be a team that, even at 3-0 down, you still want to have a chance, but you have to understand the circumstance you’re in as well. If it starts to run at fours and fives, then you’re talking about a different ballgame.”

That is the reality at a club like Celtic. You cannot hide. You cannot coast. You cannot point fingers anywhere else. Deliver or disappear. On Sunday, almost nobody delivered.

“You can see it, 100 per cent,” McGregor said of the team’s disjointed state. “You can see it, especially for the guys that have been here for a long time and the guys that have been watching Celtic for a long time.

“You see the team and how it functions and how it performs and how it behaves. And it’s just been too bitty. So we have to find a way to bring it back and bridge that gap and start to bring it together. Because if we don’t, then you’ll have more days like this.”

He knows the club inside out. He knows this is nowhere near good enough. Yes, there are new signings, players still trying to understand the system and the demands.

“There are some new guys in, trying to get them bedded in, trying to get them to understand the system, how we want the Celtic team to look,” he said. “There have been shades of it this season but not enough. So eventually the penny has to drop, we have to get there. Because you can’t just turn it on and off, it’s impossible.

“Especially when you come to venues like this. You have to be good against the ball and when you get it, you have to be the version of Celtic that we want to be. And we know it gets us success.”

The tools, he insists, are there. The information is there. The coaching is there. What is missing is consistency and collective buy-in.

“It’s reinforcement, it’s training, it’s coaching, it’s all of these things,” McGregor said. “The guys are given good information. We’ve been doing this a long time. You need to bring it together because it’s two big games that we’ve lost.

“And you probably won’t get many more before the pressure really ramps up. And we have to be honest about that, let’s not shy away from it. So we have to fix it.”

That pressure is already building. Two huge fixtures now loom this week, including Rangers at Celtic Park on Sunday. Sixty thousand will turn up, fully aware of what unfolded at Ibrox and fully aware of their captain’s stinging assessment.

They can forgive a great deal. They will not forgive a lack of effort. The message could not be clearer.

Time to deliver, Bhoys.