THE 2021/22 cinch Premiership campaign is still only at the halfway stage and Celtic are just six points behind leaders Rangers in the table.

There are another 19 games to be played and much can, and most probably will, happen before the winners are decided.

Yet, Callum McGregor has been involved in enough title races in his time to know the slightest weakness, an inability to defend set pieces, say, or a lack of strength in depth, can prove fatal to a side’s chances.

So the difficulties the Parkhead club are experiencing killing opposition teams off – a failing which resulted in them being held to a 0-0 draw by an understrength St Mirren side in Paisley on Wednesday night – are of concern to him.

McGregor admitted that he and his fellow players have held talks about their shortcomings in the final third in an attempt to eradicate a weakness that has resulted in defeats to Hearts, Rangers and Livingston as well as draws with Dundee United and Livingston and almost led to them slipping up against Ross County last week. 

Ange Postecoglou’s charges enjoyed 84 per cent possession, had 30 attempts on goal and got eight shots on target in their latest outing. But they were unable to net once and paid a high price by falling further behind their city rivals in league. It was by no means a freak occurrence.

“It was really frustrating,” said the Celtic captain. “We had enough opportunities, balls flashed across the face of goal, enough chances in general to win the game.

“It’s a little bit like where we’ve been at recently. We’ve managed to just get over the line in certain games of late. We just need to be more ruthless. When these chances come we need to take them.

“You look at all the ball we have, we have been dominating games for a long time now and creating so many chances. We need to take them as well.

“We’ve spoken about it internally. We shouldn’t need 10 chances to win a game. One or two should be enough.

“The way teams are setting up against us now, it’s more than likely that we’re going to need to get one or two to score and get your points. It’s something to work on in training.”

Not being able to field a specialist striker did nothing to help Celtic’s cause at the SMiSA Stadium in midweek; Albian Ajeti, Kyogo Furuhashi and Georgios Giakoumakis were all conspicuous by their absence from the visitors’ squad and Liel Abada had to move up front from his preferred position on the wing.

Postecoglou, who handed starts to Owen Moffat and Liam Scales and brought on Liam Shaw in the second-half, admitted that he needs to bring in some experienced footballers during the January transfer window afterwards.

But McGregor knows that to win the Premiership they have to cope with the injuries and suspensions they pick up and stressed to his team mates the need to win every domestic fixture regardless of the circumstances surrounding it. 

“There’s no bones about it, we are struggling for bodies,” he said. “But we are not a team that wants to go down the road of making excuses.

“When someone gets injured, it’s an opportunity for other players. That’s the way we have to look at it. Losing quality players does affect you and what you are trying to do. But we don’t want to go down the road of making excuses.”

Still, the 28-year-old, who is in his first season as Celtic skipper, stressed there is no need to press the panic button quite yet.

A new manager took over in the summer and immediately embarked on a massive rebuilding job – 14 new faces came in and 20 players departed – and they struggled early on both at home and abroad.

But McGregor feels that one defeat in 18 shows they are moving in the right direction. “We can’t get too carried away and focus on the one result,” he said. “We’ve been winning games for a long time now and we’ve been consistent over a period of time. We’ve been looking like the team we want to be.

“We want to add a bit of quality to that in the moments we need. But it’s been a good body of work over the period so far, in terms of where we started to where we are. We need to stay calm and stay focused. 

“In football, if you ever need a reminder of what the game can do, that was it the other night. You go from Sunday (Celtic beat Hibernian 2-1 in the Premier Sports Cup final at Hampden) to that. But we know exactly where we are as a group and where we want to get to. There’s still a lot of work to do to get there.”

McGregor is certainly keen to round off 2021 on a bright note by helping Celtic beat bottom-placed St Johnstone at McDiarmid Park in the early game on Boxing Day and put a bit of pressure on Rangers, who play St Mirren at Ibrox later on.

“Do we want to go in to the break on a high?” he said. “Absolutely. We’ll dust ourselves down. St Mirren was obviously a disappointing result, but, psychologically, it doesn’t change anything too much.

“We still want to go out on a high and then we know how important the games are when we start back. We want to rectify the other night come the end of the month.”