Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers vowed his team would be ready to atone for their new year defeat by Rangers after securing a comfortable win over a Hibernian team who beat them two weeks earlier.
Goals towards the end of each half by Daizen Maeda and Adam Idah earned a 2-0 win which sent Celtic into the Scottish Gas Scottish Cup semi-finals.
Kasper Schmeichel pulled off a good save from Kieron Bowie with the game goalless but that was the only shot on target the visitors managed and Hibs had goalkeeper Jordan Smith to thank for keeping them in the tie for so long.
Asked if the recent Easter Road defeat had been an extra motivation, Rodgers said: “We have to analyse it and see where we can be better. And we were that right from the first whistle, right to the end. Concentration was really, really good. Competitive, aggressive, strong. Win the first balls, second balls, and then we look to play.”
Celtic lost 3-0 at Ibrox on January 2 and Rodgers is clear in his mind what went wrong that day ahead of next Sunday’s derby at Parkhead.
“Listen, we were well beat on the day,” he said. “Rangers stole our game that day. That’s normally how we play and how we do, but they took it from us and deserved the win. But we will be ready for the demands of that game.
“I said before I’d never had the team really like that in any of those games. So the demands that are needed to play in that game, we will be ready for them next week like we were in the first game (a 3-0 win).
“You want to win every game. That’s always our mindset and especially those games.
“We’ve won those well and not always playing brilliant football all the time. But on that day, maybe because we were 14 points clear and we’re in a good position in the league, it just maybe softened us up a wee bit.
“But definitely we didn’t meet the demands of what you need in that game and how my teams play with intensity and physicality. So now we arrive in this game in an even better place than what we were there. But we will be in a different way and sometimes you need that.
“Sometimes you need that setback to make you think that you have to do the work.
“And these players, I have to say, what they’ve given over the course of this season, the demands that they’ve met at every level, the consistency, the mentality, the professionalism, the quality, has put us in this amazing position with a semi-final now to look forward to and nine games left in the league.”
Hibs head coach David Gray admitted Celtic were the better team.
“The effort was certainly there,” he said. “I thought we really gave absolutely everything.
“Celtic came out of the blocks as we thought they would, dominated the ball in areas where they thought they would.
“But I also thought defensively we were solid at times. I thought the shape worked well.
“But any time we really had the opportunities to hurt Celtic, our quality wasn’t there. We turned the ball over too quickly and it became a lot of defending.
“That one chance in the first half was a big moment. But we didn’t have enough of them to really say they deserved to get anything from the game.”
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