St Johnstone hero Danny Swanson last night revealed how he hauled himself from his sick bed to score the stunning winner that breathed new life in the Premiership title race.
The midfielder’s superb long range volley was enough to see Saints shock Celtic 1-0 at Parkhead and move the Perth club back into the top six and stop the Hoops from hauling themselves nine points clear at the summit in the process.
But Swanson admitted afterwards that he very nearly called off before getting on the team bus because of illness.
“I was so close to just phoning the manager,” he said.
“I was up all night but I was dying to play and I’m glad I did now.
“I texted the physio at 12pm and said I was struggling, and if I got any worse I’d let him know.
“I said I’d let him know by 4pm and I had to go and meet the bus, but I was so close to saying I wasn’t going to make it.
“I felt as good as I could have I think, but I think adrenaline got me through it.
“Even going up the stairs in the morning I was thinking to myself: “I’m out of breath here!”
“I knew I wasn’t going to last the game and the gaffer kept on saying five minutes, five minutes.
“But I’ve probably not scored a better goal than that, especially somewhere like this.
“I just hit it and luckily it went straight into the corner.
“As soon as I saw it I thought: ‘That’s a goal’.
“Craig Gordon has had a lot of attention recently and rightly so, and it was obviously going to take something special to beat him.
“But it was a great team performance.
“We’re so solid defensively and we’ve got boys who want to go and head the ball so you feel so comfortable.
“We’ve got every chance of winning and I thought we deserved that.”
Saints boss Tommy Wright was delighted to see his side move back into the Premiership’s top half and challenged his players to stay there.
“I think it would be a magnificent achievement if we could manage a top six finish,” he stressed.
“For a club our size to finish in the top six four seasons running would be a magnificent achievement, but we haven’t done it yet and we have to keep working towards that.
“We asked them to be brave in possession, we talked about finding the right balance between defending and attacking before the game and I think nobody can deny we deserved the victory.
“When you come to Parkhead you need a team performance to get anything and I think we got that.”
Celtic manager Ronny Deila felt his side looked jaded after a tough period of matches.
“It’s not good to find excuses the performance was not good enough,” he said.
“It has been a hard programme with three tough matches, and when there is a lack of energy there was not the determination to get the ball into the net.
“Every time we play in Scotland we are favourites and we should win, but there was a lack of fight an in the end we got too open.”