Celtic have already secured their first piece of silverware for the season, having won the Scottish League Cup at Hampden Park with a 2-1 win over the Rangers. Kyogo Furuhashi proved to be the hero of the day, again, as he scored a brace to guide the Hoops to victory. They do not have much time to celebrate though, as there is still a lot left to play for this season.
Having won the Scottish League Cup, there is already talk of a potential treble amongst the support. It might be a bit too early to think of that and the Bhoys must take every game as it comes to them.
But at the same time, one cannot deny that they are placed in a good position to win all three competitions this season. They are leading the Premiership by nine points with 12 more games to go. On the other hand, they are in the quarter-finals of the Scottish Cup, where they will take on Hearts.
A lot was made of the comments or ‘mind games’ coming out of the Ibrox camp before the final on Sunday. But it looks like Celtic are only focused on the task at hand and blocking out the noise. As reported by The Scotsman, Liel Abada said:
"“We don’t worry about what anyone else says, we just focus on our football and trying to win.“We know what we have to do in every game and that’s it. We just have to keep going and try to achieve our targets. If we can do that we will have a good season.“Is the target a Treble? We want to win every trophy we can but we know to do that we have to work hard every single day. Hopefully if we do that then we will get that target.“The manager doesn’t let anyone look too far ahead, it is one game at a time. He always says to us to focus on the game and the next opponent, that’s it. We look at it day to day and thankfully on Sunday we did the job, now we have to keep going.”"
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That is certainly the right way to look at things. It appears that the players are completely focused on themselves and are taking it one game at a time.
And that approach has certainly worked for them this season till now. They have been close to perfect in domestic competitions, just losing and drawing one game each at this point of time.
As for Abada, he did receive quite a bit of criticism for his dive against the Rangers. And hopefully, he will look towards that in the future.