Inside the hurting Celtic dressing room as leader urges team-mates to bank Bayern Champions League pain
Callum McGregor wants his Celtic team to make Bayern the benchmark for their future Champions League charges.
The Hoops pushed the Bundesliga giants all the way in the Allianz Arena before they were left heartbroken by Alphonso Davies’ 94th minute leveller. McGregor believes it shows how far Brendan Rodgers’ side has come and their display away to Bayern Munich was tangible proof they can go out and compete with the best in Europe.
McGregor said: “We hope so, that's when you get knocked out of these competitions and you play like that then you come away feeling like you're a good player, you're a good team and you probably should have got more out of the game. So now, straight away the hunger is there to do better and to do more.
“I know the players and I know the way they work and the feeling will be that we want to experience more of this and we want to be playing in the biggest games. We just have to bank all this and then when we get the chance next year make sure we're there and then start our work all over again from here.”
McGregor urged his players to give everything and to make sure that if they bowed out of the competition they had no regrets. That was certainly the case as the Celtic players gave absolutely everything. The only regret was that their brave efforts didn’t end up counting for something.
The proud skipper admitted: “So now with the players when they come off we've given everything and I said this the other day we want to come off the pitch with no regrets and I don't think any of the players did because they left everything out there.
"We saw the template in the first game, we've seen enough in the 25 minutes at the end of the game. We knew the game would follow a similar pattern, to be honest, we knew that we had to be good against the ball and could the team nudge that ever so slightly and start gaining momentum which we did.
“We had even more of the ball in this game than what we did in the home game which was good, so, there's another bit of progression there about feeling the situation but you can get after the ball.
“We nicked it off them a few times and the momentum of the game and the stadium started to turn so that's everything we spoke about and tried to put it into practice and we did that.”
The former Scotland star is in no doubt his team will take a lot from this European adventure. He stated: “Yes, they should all take big belief and I said that to the players for some of them, they are so young but to put on such big performances and play with such personality and maturity in the game was amazing.
“We've got some senior ones as well which bring that together and they were outstanding again tonight as well so it's a really good mix of youth and experience in the group but every single player was at the maximum level and we were just so unlucky not to progress.”
