DAVID TURNBULL says that Celtic’s players are not in Dubai for a holiday, and they will be using the training camp to give them a platform for a grandstand finish to the season.
Celtic fell 19 points behind Rangers at the top of the Premiership – with three games in hand – after falling to a 1-0 defeat at Ibrox on Saturday.
They boarded a flight to Dubai that night, but Turnbull says that nobody should misconstrue the trip as a chance for the Celtic players to have a jolly.
On the contrary, he insists that their only focus is putting together a winning run in order to exert some kind of pressure on Rangers going into the second half of the campaign.
“It’s definitely not a break,” Turnbull said. “We will be working hard on the training ground and putting things right. It will be an intense training camp.
“Listen, the boys can take a lot of heart from the performance at the weekend and we will keep fighting and keep pushing. We need to get results and that’s our aim for the second half of the season.
“Obviously the result against Rangers was not the way we wanted things to go. We played really well and it’s about retaining the belief and kicking on.
“Our heads can’t go down. We’ve played them off the park for most of the game. It’s about picking ourselves up and trying to go on that all-important winning run.
“We need to win as many games as we can. We can’t look at anyone else.
“This team has shown it’s more than capable of going on winning runs and we need to find that level of consistency in the second half of the season.
“We need to forget about the defeat, put it to the back of our minds and move on. We will focus on ourselves, dust ourselves down.
“You have to remember there’s still a lot of football to be played in the second half of the season.
“Everyone will be giving it 100 per cent.”
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