John McGlynn was proud of his Falkirk players after the fine showing they put on for over an hour at Celtic Park, and said that Brendan Rodgers being forced into sending for his expensive reinforcements from the bench was a backhanded compliment to his team.
Falkirk went ahead twice in the game and were leading 2-1 until the 70th minute, when Celtic’s big-money substitutes injected new life into their team just as the visitors began to flag from their own exertions.
In the end, Celtic proved too strong, but McGlynn took pride and plenty of positives from the display of his team against the Scottish champions up until the moment their substitutes made the difference.
“Obviously the other ones that started are not exactly cheap either,” McGlynn said.
“That was a statement, a back-handed compliment to us. Yeah, fair enough Falkirk, you've done well but here's the big guns coming on, let's see how you can handle that.
“And of course, the legs kind of fell off a little bit, little bit of gaps opened up and Nicky (Hogarth) had to make two or three more saves but you had to expect that to some extent.
“But we can take great belief from having come here and played the way we played, and made a statement that Celtic had to make four changes around the hour mark to try and turn the game in their favour, which they did.
“Players individually were playing against really good players here. Can you learn anything individually and then as a team can you learn anything? Because we play in a similar way.”
McGlynn also revealed that Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers was moved to come into the visiting dressing room to congratulate the Falkirk players on their performance.
“I was pleased, I mean big plaudits to Brendan, he came in after the game in our dressing room and complimented our players and so a great thank you for him for doing that, that will help our players as well,” he said.
“We'll take the belief that we came here and scored two goals against Celtic, nobody else has done that.”
Now, McGlynn is hoping he can reward the huge Falkirk travelling support for their backing by making days like this a more regular fixture.
“From 2:15 to five o'clock they were absolutely amazing,” he said.
“That corner, every single one stayed right until all the players went across. And so huge thank you to the fans. They've been great. They've been absolutely great. They enjoyed what they'd seen.
“They'll be a little bit like us, a little bit 'what if', but we did well. They will be like me, no criticism of the players at all.
“It's a matter of ‘yeah, we enjoyed that, we want a bit more of that'. The hunger should be oozing out of us to return here.”
