Dundee United have been in sparkling form of late, but manager Peter Houston believes they’ll have to scale even greater heights to knock Celtic out of the Scottish Cup at the weekend.
The Tangerines will welcome the SPL’s runaway leaders to Tannadice in Sunday’s quarter-final, and there’s a case to be made that they’re the two best teams in Scotland at the moment.
Taking 13 points from 15 to climb to fourth in the table is an impressive achievement, but beating Neil Lennon’s side will require an even bigger effort, according to Houston.
He said: ”We will need to play a lot better than we did against Inverness when Celtic come here on Sunday if we are wanting to knock them out of the cup.
”I have been happy with the way things are going lately, but we’ll need to step it up again if we’re going to go through.
”They are a very good side and are favourites to win the game. The one thing though is that we’ll have a go at them. It’s a cup competition so there’s no point sitting back because a draw isn’t any use.
”I think Celtic are a quality team even though they didn’t play to their normal high standards last Saturday up in Aberdeen by all accounts. We had Paul Hegarty up watching the game so have done plenty of homework.”
Houston’s opposite number has an enormous squad to choose from so Houston admits second-guessing Lennon’s team selection is no easy task.
He said: ”Celtic will come out fired up on Sunday and there are no doubts they’ve got a lot of strength in depth. I’m not sure what team will actually face us, but we’ll get together and one thing for sure is that the biggest thing is that we go into this tie and make a right good game of it.
”We’ll be at it hopefully and we’ll be attacking to try and score goals. We have scored a lot of goals lately and have been keeping clean sheets. We will need to continue doing that on Sunday.”
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