Brendan Rodgers warned his Celtic stars they need to put on a show rather than simply grinding out wins.
The Hoops boss admitted his injury hit side – who have injury concerns over Callum McGregor and Cameron Carter-Vickers – had to dig in to finally see off Livingston with a couple of late goals to reach the Scottish Cup semis. But Rodgers insisted he won’t be happy for his men to just scrape their way for the rest of the season.
He said: “This is a club where the standards are different. There are lots of teams who will here about grinding out results and finding a way to win. That doesn’t apply to Celtic – because it’s about the standard and level of performance. That is always the demand here. I understand when you have players missing you might not always find that level.
“But you have to win in the meantime. The guys managed to do that. We will go into there remaining games in the league and Scottish Cup with the aim of performing well – because I believe when we perform to our highest level we have a great chance of winning games. But if you can’t quite get to that level, for whatever reason, you still have to win.
“The players deserve credit for that. Some of them haven’t played a lot. Matt O’Riley wasn’t well all week, Stephen Welsh came in at the last minute, Nicolas coming in after not featuring. There was a little bit of disruption there, but the guys got the job done in the end. It wasn’t the performances we wanted but we got into the semi-finals, which was great.
“Also credit to Livingston. It’s been a difficult season for them but they came here and made it really difficult. We didn’t close the spaces anywhere near and the speed of our game wasn’t what we wanted. I understand it. Some of the guys coming in haven’t played a lot recently and there is a level of player missing.
“They fought to the end and the scoreline looked more comfortable than it was. I’m happy to be in the hat.”
Rodgers was relieved to get the job done with Daizen Maeda completing a late hat trick to get past Livi and Kyogo making sure in stoppage time in a hard-fought 4-2 win.
But the Hoops gaffer has some major concerns heading into the business end of the season. Carter-Vickers sat out the cup win after pulling up in training on Saturday while a timescale can’t be put on skipper McGregor’s Achilles problem.
Rodgers hopes the international break will buy the pair time – with the countdown on until the Old Firm showdown on April 7. When asked about the McGregor uncertainty, the Irishman said: “It always is if you have your top players and your captain not available.
“Of course, there will be other players who can come in, but the level that he brings the game to is beyond what a lot of our players can do. Fingers crossed again we can get to the bottom of that and he’ll be available after the international break.”
Rodgers revealed Celts are taking no chances over Carter-Vickers given the defender’s injury woes this season. The centre-back will go for a scan and he could be out of the USA international squad at the end of the month. Rodgers said: “We were just going through something very light on Saturday and he felt something in the back of his leg.
“He was okay to continue training but we just didn’t want to take any risk whatsoever with him. As much as he wants to play every game and be there, we had this earlier in the season when he said he was okay, but we ended up losing him for a number of matches.
“Hopefully it’s nothing too serious. We just have to wait and see. If players are fit and available then we can’t stop him going, that’s internationals. He’ll obviously be called up for the USA I’m sure, but we’ll just have to wait and see what the scan result says.”
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