DAVID TURNBULL will rack up his 50th game for Celtic tonight if selected against Raith Rovers, a relatively early milestone in his career at the club. As he looked around him at Livingston on Sunday though, it dawned on him that he was one of the more experienced Celtic players on the pitch.
With that status now comes responsibility, and Turnbull is happy to take on the burden of expectation that comes with being one of his team’s main creative forces, as well as the criticism when he can’t crack defences, as was the case at the Tony Macaroni.
While he admits the third away defeat from three in the Premiership stung, he has faith that both he and his teammates can get back on track.
“It’s funny, because last year everybody around me in the team had played more games,” Turnbull said. “Most of the players had experienced more at Celtic.
“But going into this season it’s changed a lot. There have been a lot of new signings.
“I think they’ve settled well, but it’s still been about helping them. I think they all know what it means to play for a club like this. It’s just about getting everyone believing and trying to do big things.
“It was a tough one to take [on Sunday]. We know it wasn’t good enough but we just want to put that right in this next game. We want to put that behind us so we’ll dust ourselves down, try to play with freedom and do whatever the manager asks us to.”
It certainly didn’t appear as though Celtic were playing with freedom against Livingston, as they laboured to create chances and looked fragile at the back.
Despite the poor away results so far this season though, Turnbull doesn’t think there is a psychological issue when Ange Postecoglou’s men go on their travels.
“I wouldn’t say so – it definitely doesn’t with me,” he said. “It’s about being focused for every match and, while we’ve lost a few away from home now, we’ll keep taking them one at a time and hopefully, the results will come.
“I’m not sure what went wrong on Sunday. You always know that Livingston away is going to be hard but, although there were spells in the game when we did well, we just didn’t create clear goalscoring opportunities we could put away. We know we can do better.
“You go into some games and teams sit in, it becomes about our football. We need to break them down and create goal-scoring opportunities and kind of play our football the way we like to...no matter the opposition.”
They may face a similar conundrum tonight, even with the advantage of being on home soil.
Turnbull is taking nothing for granted against Raith Rovers, but says there is a determination within the home dressing room to get themselves back to winning ways.
“All the boys are looking forward to it because a win takes us into the semi-finals, which would be a step in the right direction,” he said.
“We treat every game in the same way but our home form has been good this season so we’ll back ourselves to go on a run. We’ve been performing well but it’s about achieving consistency and doing that in every game.
“Cup games bring their own pressure but everyone will be up for it. We’ll be fired up because getting to Hampden is a big incentive.
“It’s one of the cups and we want to win as much as we can here. We want to go on a run, starting with a win tomorrow. It would be great to get to Hampden again and see where it takes us.
“Of course it would be great to get some silverware so early in the season - give everybody confidence going into the latter part, second half of the season.”
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