Carl McHugh isn’t paying much attention to Celtic’s 64-game unbeaten streak.
This Sunday, McHugh leads Motherwell out for the Betfred Scottish League Cup final against the Hoops at Hampden Park.
Celtic, battered 7-1 by Paris St Germain on Wednesday night in the Champions League in Paris, come into the final looking to continue their super streak in domestic football.
You have to wind back to May 2016 and a game against St Johnstone for the last time Celtic lost a domestic game.
“Celtic are obviously a great side and what they’ve done since Brendan Rodgers came in has been brilliant but we feel we can win the game, definitely,” McHugh, from Lettermacaward said.
“I don’t really care, we focus on ourselves. We focus on every game, it’s a cliché but we do.
“We take each game and each opposition team on their merits and we work really hard during the week, try and take it into the games and see where it takes us.”
Bradford City were in League Two, the fourth tier of English football, when they reached the Capital One Cup final at Wembley in 2013. They lost 5-0 to Premier League Swansea City in the final, but Bradford, at the time.
McHugh was one of the heroes as Bradford defeated Wigan Athletic, Arsenal and Aston Villa to reach the final.
Now, though, as he gets ready to captain Motherwell into Sunday’s final, there is none of the mystical magic that prevailed through Bradford’s march to Wembley.
He said: “This time it’s different. When we beat Aston Villa and Arsenal it was the stuff of dreams but this doesn’t feel like that.
“We expected to beat Rangers in the semi-final.
“I don’t think anybody outside our dressing room expected us to win in the semi but we fully expected that we would come and win the game.
“And it wasn’t just words. We weren’t just saying that, we fully believed it.”
