CELTIC captain Callum McGregor has already set his sights on next term as he warned that the biggest challenge now for Ange Postecoglou’s side is preserving their champion status.
"The challenge now is it's easy to chase and be desperate to get something but the hard part is to retain it,” he said. “We need to get better individually and collectively, there's loads of rooms for improvement. The only way you do that is coming back with a fresh hunger to be successful again."
While there was a sense last summer that this season could have been one of transition given the scope of work which needed to be carried out, McGregor’s grounding within the club offered him a more realistic take.
"You always have to go through difficult moments, especially when you are building a team,” he said. “Everyone at the start of the season was giving us two or three years to build a team but I spoke right at the start and said if we had that mentality within the group we would never achieve anything.
"I saw early on that we had recruited winners, guys who wanted to do well and others who experienced last year and didn't want it again. That drove the standards and everything we do in training and what you see out there today is the end product of all that hard work and sacrifice.
"This club demands success and the reality is that after six weeks we were under pressure. That tells you what the expectation is and we knew that exactly. The pleasing thing is you could see everybody was hungry to do well and then we just had to fine tune it, build performances and togetherness within the team.
"When you are a winner and it is taken away from you, it hurts you. You take it personally. It's a long summer and you can't wait to put it right. There's no guarantees but you do everything in power to make sure it doesn't happen again.”
