Josip Juranovic has revealed he had a chat with his countryman Luka Modric after the Real Madrid tie on Tuesday.
The two Croatian internationals went head to head on the night with Luka helping his side to a 3-0 victory — a second half performance from the Spanish giants ensured Celtic’s hard work would not ultimately pay dividends on the night.
At 37, Luka is still every bit the class act. His ability is outstanding and he made Celtic pay when it counted.
Inside the tunnel, after the game, Josip revealed the chat with his international captain.
“I spoke with him after the game. He was telling me that the crowd was amazing and that we played good, first half especially, and that we need to continue like that.
“What can I say? He’s captain of my national team, a really good person and you saw that he’s a really good player, too,” Jura said as reported by Glasgow Times.
Going into detail about the game itself, The Celtic right back has made it clear the overall result hasn’t changed the outlook.
“It was a game of two halves. The first half we take it very serious, we have our chances, Callum hit the post unfortunately and then second half with Daizen we didn’t score and of course, it’s Real Madrid. If we have our chances and don’t score they will have one and score from it immediately.
“If we take the first half into our next games, there’s much positive to take from that. We need to delete this second half (from our minds) because they didn’t have full chances, it was like half-chances but they took them and we didn’t – that’s all. We gave everything to this match but we didn’t take our chances. We need to look at the video and then we will talk with our manager and see what we need to do. Our confidence is still really high.”
There were so many ‘what if’ moments for Celtic before Real’s first goal. Liel Abada being out through but fluffing his shot. Callum McGregor’s thunderous strike shaking the post and Josip firing it across goal to an onrushing Maeda who couldn’t get the ball out of his feet, bouncing off him and easily into Courtouis hands.
We can take immense heart from the first half performance and the confidence we hung with the current European champions for as long as we diss
Up next is Shakhtar Donetsk. A real chance for the bhoys to get points on the board, but it won’t be easy, this Shakhtar side aren’t messing around and they’ve already shown how dangerous they can be against Leipzig.
