Alistair Johnston says he understands why unsung hero Greg Taylor is stalling on a new Celtic contract ahead of Kieran Tierney’s arrival at the club.
The Hoops right-back believes the 27-year-old is under-rated at Parkhead and is adamant Taylor will be a huge loss to Brendan Rodgers’ dressing-room if he leaves this summer. The Scot will be a free agent in June and already has strong overseas interest from the likes of Trabzonspor, Panathinaikos and Dinamo Zagreb.
Tierney has signed a pre-contract deal to return to Celtic from Arsenal and, after five years as the first-choice left-back, Taylor is reluctant to play second fiddle to his international team-mate. Johnston sympathises with the situation Taylor finds himself in. And after a small section of the support appeared to be getting on Taylor’s back during Wednesday night’s Champions League defeat to Bayern Munich, the Canadian offered support to his fellow full-back.
He said: “It’s always tough when a player is running out of contract. You know how much Greg loves the club and how much he’d love to be here. I won’t speak for him but it must be difficult knowing KT’s coming in the summer.
“Greg’s someone who often gets overlooked but who helps us do so much with his ability to come inside and impact the play. If this is his last year he’ll be seriously missed on and off the pitch.
“But you can understand that he wants to play every week and with Kieran coming back that’s maybe not going to happen. Whatever happens, though, he’ll always give his best for the club and we should back him for that.”
Meanwhile, Johnston wants Celtic to go toe-to-toe with Bayern at the Allianz Area to keep their Champions League dream alive. The full-back believes they’ve got nothing to lose in the play-off return with the Bundesliga giants leading 2-1 after the Parkhead meeting.
He said: “We have to go for it over there, 100 percent. As underdogs we have nothing to lose in Munich against a team expected to be right there at the end of this tournament.
“Their home record in Europe is immense, it’s unbelievable. But we’re still in it and we’ve given ourselves a chance – no matter how slim.
“We have to go there believing we can cause them problems, which I think we did on Wednesday night for the last 40 minutes. We know we can cause Bayern issues, which is really important.
“Because it’s OK talking about having a go. But we have something tangible to base that on now. We’ve got the video and can say: ‘Look at what we did, here are the chances we created against them’. So we have that to build on, which is the bare minimum if we’re going to get anything over there.”