Mackay-Steven fully focused on a win in Norway

Celtic midfielder Gary Mackay-Steven is aware that Thursday’s opponent Molde rise to the top of the Europa League group shows that they are no pushovers, but the Hoops are still looking for all three points.

The Norwegian outfit picked up a 1-1 draw with Ajax earlier in the month, following a huge 3-1 win over Fenerbache in their own back yard. These two results have left followers stunned, as Molde flew straight to the top.

With big-spenders Fenerbache in the group, alongside two previous European champions, many were expecting the Tippeligaen side to crumble under the pressure of playing against some of the world’s elite sides that are in the competition.

Speaking to the Celtic View, Mackay-Steven acknowledges that he and the rest of his Celtic team-mates will need to put in a good performance against the Norwegian side.

It’s not what everyone predicted, but it just shows how strong Molde are.

We played Fenerbahce recently and watched videos of their game against Molde in Turkey and we’ve seen a lot of their style of play.

They looked a real, good, strong unit with a lot of pace and energy. We certainly can’t take them for granted and that’s maybe a good thing because perhaps if we’d played them to start with, we might have thought it was going to be the easiest game. I certainly don’t think that’ll be the case now and we’ll need to treat them with a lot of respect.

You know Fenerbahce and Ajax have individual players but Molde look like a real team. They looked really compact but if they got the ball they broke at pace, similar to what we try to do.

They created a lot of chances and the players were really comfortable on the ball so they’re going to be dangerous, especially at home and we’ll need to be ready for that.

Molde’s form in Europe is starting to show cracks as the small side attempt to create the balance between this and their domestic season, which is hard for the best of teams.

For our own prospects the plan was always to try to win.

We’ve had two good results already and played well but to go over there and win would set us up in a really nice position in the table.

That’s the plan – to go over there and execute our game-plan and ultimately win the game. It is not going to be easy but we’ll keep looking at them in-depth and see what we can exploit.