The night Celtic REALLY arrived among Champions League elite as opponents 'just stopped running'
Thirty-five days earlier they’d had the legs run off them in a Borussia Dortmund chasing. But Callum McGregor insists Celtic’s next Champions League contest against Bundesliga opposition was the night that Brendan Rodgers side truly hit their stride at the top level.
A night when the Hoops were so fast, so in sync, that the skipper reckons RB Leipzig simply stopped running and gave up pressing long before the final whistle. That explosive 3-1 victory on Bonfire Night set alight dreams of charging into the knockout stages for the first time in 12 years.
It left the McGregor convinced this group of players were ready to take the next step. That they were capable of matching the very best over the course of 90 minutes - and hurting them. October’s 7-1 demolition in the Westfalenstadion had stang for weeks and had critics predicting Celtic’s Champions League race was over before it had properly began. But the Parkhead side learned lessons and made it through the league phase of the revamped competition with a game to spare. Now comes judgement day with a third Bundesliga assignment and the toughest of them all.
If the Hoops are to stand any chance of producing a seismic result against Bayern Munich they will need to reproduce the Leipzig display. And then some. A performance McGregor agrees is the most intense he has ever been involved in.
He said: “We have to get very, very close to it. The aggressive nature of their press, they will come flying after us. So we have to be aware of that and maybe skip lines and go into the second line. That's where we were really good against Leipzig.
“The whole team was connected. Everybody was moving in sync. By the end of the night, Leipzig actually stopped running because we had every