Callum McGregor has experienced some of his career highs and lows against German opposition, for both club and country. And just this season, he has run the gamut of emotions against some of the Bundesliga’s best teams.
At the start of Celtic’s Champions League campaign, they suffered the humiliation of the 7-1 trouncing in Dortmund that seemed to signal another season of impending disappointment at the elite European level for the Scottish champions.
But they bounced back from that body blow to turn in one of their most impressive Champions League performances of recent years against RB Leipzig at Celtic Park, the 3-1 scoreline hardly doing justice to the level of dominance that Celtic enjoyed on the night, and used that win as a springboard to reaching the playoff phase of the competition.
The Leipzig game, McGregor says, was one of the most intense and complete Celtic performances that he has been involved in, and the captain knows that it that sort of level that will be required this week against Bayern Munich if his team are to progress any further in this season’s Champions League.
“I think you have to get very, very close to it,” McGregor said.
“Obviously, I think it's similar in terms of the way they want to press the game, maybe in a different shape, but the aggressive nature of their press will come flying after us.
(Image: Ross MacDonald - SNS Group) “So, for us, we'll have to be aware of that and maybe skip lines and go into the second line and set passes. That's where we were really good against Leipzig. The whole team was connected. Everybody was moving in sync.
“By the end of the night, Leipzig actually stopped running because we had every solution. So, that's the template for the game. They'd almost started looking at each other and stopped running because every time they went to press, we played our way out and almost scored from playing right the way through the pitch.
“You come away [from that night] and, first and foremost, you're proud of the team's performance, and what that was everything that Celtic wants to be in Europe.
“So, to go and accomplish that against a really high-level opponent, you start to get a sense of, yeah, we're on the right track and we're doing the right thing and to play football the right way against these teams.
“Then, when you come off, you feel like a good footballer and you feel like you're a good team.
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“That was us at the highest level of football against a really top opponent. So, we'll have to bring something similar on Wednesday night.
“They'll be aggressive, and we've got to be good with the ball and try and take away that pressure from them. Maybe that will give us a bit of comfort in the game.”
On the other side of the coin, there was cold comfort to be taken for Celtic that night back in early October in Signal Iduna Park, but there were certainly plenty of lessons to be taken from it, and McGregor feels those have proved crucial to the vastly improved Champions League performances since then.
“I think the good thing is that we've sort of learned from the Dortmund thing,” he said.
“The Leipzig one was much more controlled against the ball. Sometimes you realise you've got to suffer a wee bit in shape and press at different times in the game. You can't just chase every single pass.
“So, I think we've got a much better understanding of, one, the level, two, how you approach it and how you maximise what we've got in the team as well. So, the template's good.
“And then even off the back of the Aston Villa game, you go two down and you fight your way back into the game as well.
“So, there's a wee bit of maturity from that that hopefully we can use on Wednesday night as well.”
That evolution of this Celtic side at the top level has been a theme that manager Brendan Rodgers has returned to as their campaign has progressed in the competition, and McGregor agrees that their development has been stark.
“Definitely,” he said.
“I think even with the amount of games that we've played in the Champions League as well, the players adapt as you play the games.
(Image: Craig Williamson - SNS Group) “There's a week sometimes between the games. There's two weeks between the games. But when you play eight games at the level, everybody starts to feel how quick it is and tactically where you need to be and when you can press the game.
“So, I think the development of the team has been really good since the first game. Now we're much more comfortable in that Champions League bracket of teams where we believe that we can hurt teams as well, and we've shown that.
“So, it's okay to be talking a good game but we've actually then taken that to the pitch and shown and there's been something to show for that. Wednesday night is another chance for us to show how much we've learned throughout the league phase.
“We back ourselves and let's hope we have a good night.”
