McGregor: Celtic 'a team of individuals' in Rangers rout

Callum McGregor did not mince his words after Celtic's 3-0 defeat to Rangers in the Premier Sports Cup quarter-final at Ibrox on Sunday.

"You saw a team and you saw a team of individuals."

Celtic had arrived with a perfect domestic record intact and were swept aside. Dan Neil, a 24-year-old midfielder who joined Rangers in July, put the hosts ahead on 23 minutes after two glaring errors from visiting goalkeeper Sam Johnstone went unpunished, then added a second before Kevin Kelsy completed the scoring.

McGregor was blunt about what went wrong. "Rangers were a team and we looked like a team of individuals who wanted to do our own thing, play when we got the ball and not necessarily run when we don't have the ball," said the midfielder. "That's the one thing you can't do when you come here, is not run. You can't defend with six players, it's impossible."

It is the second chastening result of the season for Martin O'Neill's side, after Celtic squandered a 4-0 aggregate lead against LASK in Champions League qualifying. "We're trying to get the message to everyone that we have to be a team and we need to find a way to do that quickly because we lost a big game to LASK and lost another one today," McGregor added. "If we want to be a good Celtic team, we need to win the big games. We've been bitty so far and we need to fix it."

O'Neill fielded four new signings from the start at Ibrox — Johnstone, Kasper Hogh, Camilo Duran and Mika Baur — with three more summer arrivals introduced from the bench. The manager had no complaints about the scoreline. "We were well beaten," he said. "The 3-0 scoreline doesn't hide it, it was a tough afternoon for us. We were well in the game early on, even at half time, but they were stronger than us on the day and they deserved to win."

O'Neill said the result needs to serve as a wake-up call to his new recruits before the sides meet again. "I think there has to be a realisation of how big this game is. It's so important to the fans, so important to everybody. It's still one of the great fixtures, as mentioned, in European football, if not the world. And people have got to know that. That's the point. We'll have to try and learn from it."

Celtic have little time to regroup. They open their Europa League campaign at home to Ferencváros on Thursday at 20:00 BST, then host Rangers again in the Scottish Premiership next Sunday — a fixture set to be McGregor's 50th Old Firm derby. "We've put ourselves under pressure and we need to respond on Thursday and again on Sunday," McGregor said.

A back-to-back double header against the same opponents rarely allows for a slow recovery. If Celtic cannot fix the defensive lapses and lack of cohesion McGregor described inside a week, Sunday's derby at Celtic Park risks becoming a third damaging result in the space of a month.