Inside the Celtic huddle as Callum McGregor reveals how he finds 'right words' for Rangers cup final

Over the years he’s become the ultimate footballing machine.

Churning out appearance after appearance while collecting trophy after trophy as Celtic’s captain. That’s just what Callum McGrergor has been programmed to do. Over the last 10 years, McGregor has got his hands on 21 of them. And at Hampden – where he has never lost a cup final – he’ll be going all out to make it No.22.

There’s almost a robotic quality to the way Celtic have gone about sweeping up silverware during all this time and McGregor admits the mentality is now hard wired into a dressing room rammed full with serial winners. He said: “It certainly gives you a good template of what to do and how to manage the occasion. It’s managing individuals as well, you’re trying to manage the crowd, you’re trying to manage the game, you’re trying to manage the referees and VAR and everything else. You’ve then got to revert back to what your process is and how you stay calm and what you’re actually looking for in the game. How you want it to look.

“I think if you do that then it slides the scale in your favour because your process generally works, the way we play generally works. So, if you do all that and you keep sliding that scale towards what you normally do then, by the law of averages, more times than not, you’ll come out on the successful end of that. So, it’s about having the kind of experience and being over the course, you have more of a template to follow which hopefully will give us success.”

McGregor, of course, has taken over where Scott Brown left off. The armband may have been passed on three years ago but the production line hasn’t missed a beat. Three league titles have been piled up since then along with one Scottish Cup and two League Cups.