When Callum McGregor is reduced to telling his Celtic team-mates ‘no more goals’ its time for a reality check, but will it come in time for Sunday?

There are moments in a football match that tell you everything you need to know.

Last Sunday at Ibrox handed us one of them.

It wasn’t a goal, or a tackle, or a save, or one of Martin O’Neill’s substitutions.

It was our captain, caught on camera, turning to his defenders and telling them not to concede any more.

“No more goals…”

Three words.

Three words that summed that afternoon up better than three thousand of mine ever could.

When the captain of Celtic is reduced to damage limitation at Ibrox, the game is already long gone

Because that is exactly what it was.

Damage limitation.

Three goals down, with a big chunk of the game still to play, Callum McGregor looked around him and made a call.

He decided the priority was no longer winning the football match.

The priority was not getting humiliated any further than we already had been.

And here is the bit that sticks in my throat – he was right to make that call.

He was absolutely right.

When was the last time you watched a Celtic captain do that at Ibrox?

I genuinely can’t remember one.

The Daily Record put the moment to him this week, and to his credit he didn’t hide behind it.

“Yeah, you don’t want fours and fives for sure. As soon as the goal went in, then I’m saying to Cam (Carter-Vickers) and (Liam) Scalesy, ‘Look, no more goals, we have to just tighten this up’.

“Of course, we always want to get back in the game. And we always want to be a team that, even at 3-0 down, you still want to have a chance, but you have to understand the circumstance you’re in as well.”

Understand the circumstance you’re in.

That is a Celtic captain telling you, as politely as he can manage, that his team were beaten long before the final whistle.

Nobody has stopped to consider how soul destroying that must be for a man like Callum McGregor

This is a player who has won just about everything there is to win in this country.

He has gone to that ground season after season fully expecting to take something out of it.

He is not a man who is used to counting the cost of a hiding.

Yet there he was on Sunday, doing the sums in his head about how bad it could still get.

Can you imagine what that does to somebody with that much pride in the jersey?

Because make no mistake, McGregor’s commitment to Celtic has never once been in question.

He is the last man in that dressing room who deserved to find himself in that position.

And the players who put him there should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

He saw a team in one half and a collection of individuals in the other

That was the other thing our captain said this week, and it was the line that worried me most.

“I think the difference between the two sides was you’ve seen a team and then you’ve seen a team of individuals as well.

“We looked like a team of individuals that wanted to do our own thing and play when we got the ball.”

A team of individuals.

Where have we heard that one before?

We heard it in Austria, when a four goal lead against LASK was handed back with interest.

Runners not tracked, second balls not won, and nobody within ten yards of a cross.

The Ibrox side simply borrowed the LASK template and ran the whole thing through again.

And our captain had to stand in the middle of it all and watch the rerun.

So no, this is not a McGregor problem.

He doesn’t have the legs to cover for four or five players who fancy a day off.

Mika Baur and Benjamin Nygren are lovely footballers on the ball, but that fixture asks for something else entirely.

Our wingers cannot stand and wait for the ball to arrive before deciding to join in.

There is a proper shift to be put in without the ball, and where exactly was it on Sunday?

If this doesn’t light a fire under that dressing room before next Sunday, then nothing ever will

Here is where I try to find something positive in all of it.

That moment has to be eating away at him.

It has to have sat in him all week, because I know fine well it would be sitting in me.

And a hurt Callum McGregor is exactly what this Celtic side needs right now.

He knows better than anybody what next Sunday actually is.

Beat them at Celtic Park and the whole thing resets, the noise dies down, and we go again.

Lose it, and this season descends into chaos before the nights have even drawn in.

Is anybody at Celtic Park prepared to admit that out loud?

Because we’ve handed Derek McInnes momentum he could never have earned on his own.

Now we have to go and take it straight back off him.

The lessons from LASK clearly never got read by anybody at Celtic.

Ferencváros on Thursday will tell us whether a single word of this one has sunk in.

Then it’s them, at our place, with our support roaring the team on behind us.

What more motivation could any Celtic player possibly need?

If the sight of our own captain organising damage limitation at Ibrox doesn’t move these players, nothing the manager says to them will.

It shouldn’t take a reality check from Callum McGregor to get a Celtic team running.

But here we are.

Over to you, lads…

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