Callum McGregor will use his bitter ending to last season as “fuel” for more success with Celtic.
The Hoops skipper endured what he described afterwards as “the worst moment I’ve ever had in football” in the Scottish Cup final in May after his penalty was saved by Aberdeen keeper Dimitar Mitov in a surprise shootout defeat that denied Brendan Rodgers’ side a domestic treble.
More than five weeks on from his Hampden agony, McGregor is revitalised, refocused and “hungry” to lead Celtic towards more silverware.
“It was a tough moment, there’s no shying away from that,” the 32-year-old said in a press conference to promote his team’s pre-season friendly away to Cork on July 8.
“I think what that does is it just gives you more motivation to go and achieve even more.
“It’s the ones that you don’t win that stay with you and fuel the fire for you, so I had a couple of weeks off to digest it and try and find a positive somewhere in it.
“All it does is it makes me even more hungry to go and be successful and to win even more.
“I’ve been here a long time, there’s highs, there’s lows and you have to try and find an even keel and keep yourself in a nice balanced headspace.
“There’s been ups and downs throughout my career and I’ve always managed to bounce back so I don’t see this being any different.”
In his first summer since announcing his retirement from Scotland duty, McGregor has enjoyed having extra time to “decompress” between seasons.
“Obviously this was a longer summer than what I’ve had previously so to not have international duty, you can spend a bit more time with your family and just decompress a little bit,” he said.
“It just gives that freshness for when you come back in and hopefully that will help me through another season in which we’ll probably have 60-plus games.”
After qualifying automatically for the Champions League in each of the previous three seasons, Celtic – who reached the knockout phase last term – will have to come through a play-off round in August to reach the main phase of the tournament due to a drop in Scotland’s position in UEFA’s association ranking for the five-year period from the 2019-20 to 2023-24 campaigns.
“Of course, if we had our way then we would want to be straight in but we have to understand that that is just part and parcel of it,” McGregor said.
“We’ve been here a number of times throughout the years. We believe that when we’ve been in the competition, especially last season, we’ve done well but no-one has the God-given right to be put in there right away.
“You have to earn your place. For the play-off games, there’ll be five or six, seven or eight teams who all think they’re good enough to be there but you have to earn the right.
“It’s an amazing competition and I think we saw great growth in the team last season throughout the 10 games to the point there where we went away to Bayern Munich and were so close to getting a result.
“That should stand us in good stead but I don’t want to take anything for granted so let’s get in there first and hopefully we can have a similar campaign and even improve on that as well.”
