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Friday Round-Up: Back To Business

callum’s up for the cup

Celtic v Hibernian - Ladbrokes Scottish Premiership
Callum McGregor celebrates scoring against Hibs last month
Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

THE BIG STORY: Following Wednesday’s loss in Munich - read our match report and player ratings - it’s back to domestic duty at lunchtime tomorrow and an intriguing looking Betfred Cup semi-final against Neil Lennon’s Hibs at Hampden Park.

Callum McGregor - who was an unused sub against Bayern and scored a brace against Hibs in the 2-2 draw at Celtic Park last month - is looking forward to creating more ‘happy memories’ at Hampden for Celtic. The team picked by Brendan Rodgers will be very interesting after the exertions of Wednesday night and we’ll have more on tomorrow’s game in our match preview later today.

SITE NEWS: First of all big thanks to our very own onlylovehh for his match report and manning the Twitter account on Wednesday night, apologies for the lack of a round-up yesterday but your humble correspondent was stuck in Manchester. The round-up is back today, and for the foreseeable future. Hooray!

OTHER NEWS: The tactics deployed by Brendan Rodgers against Bayern have been subject to plenty of debate, particularly after his comments that he will ‘not change Celtic’s approach’ when it comes to games in Europe, a stance that Callum McGregor has backed.

It seems that Rodgers will stick to Celtic’s ‘aggressive’ approach no matter the result in Europe - at Liverpool he only really did it once in a 1-0 defeat to Real Madrid and he was met with heavy criticism - let’s be honest he didn’t change if after we lost 7-0 to Barca last season so I fear that the return game against Bayern and the trip to Paris next month could end with Celtic suffering some more heavy defeats, which hopefully won’t dent the team’s confidence, we will find out tomorrow how the loss to Bayern has affected the players.

ON THIS DAY: In 2002 a Henrik Larsson brace was the highlight of a 4-1 win over Hearts at Tynecastle. A first-half blitz had Celtic 4-0 up at half-time, with the other goals scored by Sutton and Petrov. You can watch the full match below...but I’d skip the second-half.

In 1993 a Gerry Creaney goal gave Celtic a 1-0 win over Sporting Lisbon in the first leg of a UEFA Cup second round tie at Celtic Park. The man of the match was Pat Bonner, who denied Sporting - who featured future Celtic Jorge Cadete - with a string of fine saves. Frank Connor was the caretaker manager of Celtic for this game, Lou Macari would become the permanent manager later in the week.