Ross County manager Jim McIntyre expects his players to be fired up for the challenge of becoming Celtic’s first domestic conquerors this season when the sides meet at Victoria Park on Sunday.
The Hoops have yet to be defeated in the Premiership this season, drawing only three matches, while manager Brendan Rodgers also guided the Parkhead club to the League Cup courtesy of a 3-0 win against Aberdeen in November.
Celtic remain in pursuit of the domestic treble and have a Scottish Cup semi-final against Rangers next weekend but McIntyre does not expect they will treat the trip to Dingwall lightly and reckons the prospect of going through the campaign as “the invincibles” will mean a lot to Rodgers’ players.
McIntyre said: “I don’t know about mentally switching off, that group of players is so focused. They’ve got two trophies in the bag and another one to go for. Deep down they’ll want this unbeaten run to go until the end of the season.
“If I was a player in that squad that would be one of the goals, without a shadow of a doubt. It’s up to us to be as prepared as we possibly can, and we will be. We’ll look forward to the game.
“To be unbeaten in a league campaign is no mean feat but the challenge is there for us to try and be that team that manages to go and do it.
“We must not fear the game – when we play against good sides we want to test ourselves against players of that calibre.
“It’s 11 versus 11 on the day and we know if we play to our best we’ve got a chance of winning the game.”
County fell to a 4-0 defeat in Celtic’s last visit to Dingwall in October, with the Hoops netting three goals in the last seven minutes.
McIntyre has warned his players any switch off will be quickly punished by the Glasgow outfit and he added: “It’s a big challenge. We’ve got good players here, but we need to be fully concentrated. That’s the biggest thing when you play against top sides.
“The concentration levels have got to be spot on for the whole game, because generally when that switch-off happens, top players punish you.
“We will be ready for it, we know it’s a really difficult match. No one expects us to get anything but there’s an expectancy level from ourselves that we need to put on a good performance.
“Our focus when we play a top team is to get that balance right. For 80 minutes we did that very well the last time we played Celtic at Dingwall.
“We changed the system and tried to open up in the last 10 minutes to get an equaliser but we lost three late goals. That’s the quality Celtic have.”
