IBROX tomorrow, you feel, will be no place for shrinking violets. It’s just as well then, for Celtic’s prospects, that their manager has got the players feeling like giants.

Celtic released the audio this week of Ange Postecoglou’s pre-match speech to his men before the League Cup final in December, with his stirring address inspiring his players to a 2-1 win over Hibernian to secure the first silverware of the season.

According to Callum McGregor, the Celtic captain, it was simply a snapshot of how Postecoglou has gone about imbuing confidence and belief into his squad since he first arrived at the club. And it is why the Celtic players will walk out into the Ibrox maelstrom tomorrow with their chests puffed out, their heads held high, and ready to run through brick walls for their manager, each other, and their club.

“He speaks really well,” McGregor said. “He’s been doing that constantly throughout the season.

“He comes in and he’s really motivational when he speaks. He makes the players feel ten feet tall.

“When you back that up with good structure, good organisation and everyone knowing their job, then it can make you feel really good when you go out on that pitch.

“You feel really safe and secure and you know you’ve got your mates around you to help you.

“He’s been doing that all season for us. He’s given us huge amounts of confidence and belief within the squad that we can go out on the pitch and look after each other and play our football.

“We’ve built a really good togetherness, and that comes from having good people down to your core who want to do well for the football club.

“He’s managed to harness that, and along with the senior players he’s managed to get the best out of everyone, and that’s what we strive to do every day.

“We’re all good guys and we want success, so that sort of naturally comes out within the group.

“We just keep pushing and keep demanding from each other every day to make it a positive environment.”

It will be anything but a positive environment that greets the Celtic players at Ibrox tomorrow lunchtime, and McGregor believes it is crucial his teammates play the game in front of them, and not the occasion.

He acknowledges too that it will be difficult to approach the game as they would like to, in treating it the same as any other.

“Yeah I think so,” he said. “But I think the reason why we’ve put ourselves in such a good position is by attacking every game one at a time and approaching it the same way.

“We try to take the emotion out the game, the emotion out of the situation, and carry out the game plan the manager wants us to.

“I think everyone has seen that if we manage to do that, then we can get positive results, and I think that is the belief within the squad.

“If you can stick to the structure and do what the manager asks you to do, take the emotion out, play with your brain and pass the ball properly, then you can get positive results.

“That’s the way we will approach it at the weekend as well. We have to go there, be calm under pressure and play our football.”

Much talk in the build-up to the game has been centred upon whether Celtic can replicate the performance levels they reached when blowing Rangers away in a breathless first half at Celtic Park in February, eventually coasting to a 3-0 victory.

McGregor points out though that even the first meeting between the sides this season at Ibrox, when a Celtic team still early in its development feel to a 1-0 defeat, offered plenty of encouraging signs that his team can go to Govan and dominate Rangers by playing Postecoglou’s brand of football.

“Regardless of whether it’s a home game, an away game or a European game, he wants us to impose our style on the game and make the other team change for us,” he said.

“Early on in the season we went there and we put on a decent performance. We didn’t get the result we wanted, but that gave us belief within the squad that we were moving in the right direction.

“Obviously the next stage of that was to marry that with the results as well. Since then, we’ve obviously went on a really good run of performances and wins, and we’ve put ourselves in a good position.

“So, it’s just important that we stay calm, we are calm under pressure, we stick to what the manager asks us to do in the gameplan and we do believe in that.

“It’s important come Sunday that we don’t come away from that or change our belief in any way, we just go in full of confidence that if we do the right things, we can get a positive result.”

A draw, given their three-point advantage and superior goal difference to Rangers, would still represent such a positive result for Celtic, but McGregor says there is no way that Postecoglou would allow his men to approach the match in cagey fashion.

“It’s always a difficult balance to strike with that mentality,” he said. “If you go in there playing for a draw then anything can happen in the game.

“I think it’s important that we just approach it in the same way we always do, the manager wouldn’t allow us to approach if any other way anyway.

“It’s not in his DNA to take a backwards step or play for draws, so one thing is for sure, he will be setting the team up in a positive way and asking us to go out and play our football.

“We then as players have to stay calm and play under pressure, and that’s what we’ll try to do.”