AIMING FOR EVEN GREATER HEIGHTS

Forrest insists Celtic have bettered the Invincibles season and believes they can go further by nailing a treble Treble

BRENDAN Rodgers keeps raising the bar. And his players keep having to respond. It is a process James Forrest will soon be ready to go through all over again.

The expectations for next season will be set when Celtic return to training at Lennoxtown in mid-June.

After making history with back-to-back Trebles, the obvious question is what the Parkhead side have left to achieve domestically.

To Forrest, the answer is equally obvious. They will try to do it all again — only better.

Asked about the possibility of a ‘treble Treble’, the Scotland winger said: ‘Quite a few people have mentioned that already and, when we report back for pre-season training, that’s what everyone will be wanting.

‘We now know how difficult it is to earn that but we’ll just need to make sure that we keep working hard.

‘This year winning the league was much harder for us. We drew a few games and lost a few as well, which proved that.

‘It also shows what a great achievement this is and how high the standards we’ve set ourselves are since the manager came in. We’re all absolutely buzzing with how things have gone since then.

‘However, we want to keep kicking on. That’s what the manager said to us last year: “How do you better the Invincibles season?”. But I think we’ve managed to do that because we’ve made history now and that’s incredible.

‘The way the gaffer is, he’ll come back again in the summer and want our standards to be raised even further.

‘He told us that, after his first season, we could have gone a little soft after doing so well and maybe we haven’t always done as well as we could but it’s another clean sweep and that’s amazing.’

Indeed, for all the uniqueness of the previous unbeaten campaign, Forrest takes even more satisfaction in the latest achievement that was sealed by Saturday’s 2-0 Scottish Cup final win over Motherwell.

‘I think it’s better because, obviously, this has never been done before,’ he added.

‘We’ve had to be at the top of our game to do that for two seasons and it’s taken a lot of hard work. This is unbelievable for everyone at the club.

‘We have a lot of fans working at the club and it’s great for them as well. No one has seen this before in their lifetime. Even getting the open-top bus was a first for us and that was brilliant as well.

‘The timing was great too, what with the skipper (Scott Brown) having his testimonial on the Sunday. He was hoping it would go well at Hampden, for the club but also for his day, and he deserved it to turn out the way it did.

‘Was it a weight off our shoulders to get there? It would be fair to say that.

‘There’s massive pressure in every game you play for this club but we’ve never experienced anything bigger than going into this week, knowing that the double Treble was at stake.

‘But we turned up at Hampden, put in a really good team performance and we were delighted with the win.’

Forrest closed the season having played in excess of 60 games for club and country. That tally is obviously pleasing for a player who suffered plentiful injury issues earlier in his career, yet the 26-year-old will still appreciate the forthcoming downtime.

‘It’s going to be good,’ admitted Forrest. ‘We’ll have a few weeks now to rest but also to prepare for coming back pre-season, which is always tough.

‘This year, we also have an extra two Champions League qualifiers to play. So we’re loving this at the moment but we’ll be ready when next season comes.

‘The body needs time to recover. It’s been 50-odd games for a lot of us but, as the manager tells us, that’s what happens when you’re successful. Everyone wants to be involved in cup finals and you’re happy to stay on for that extra week to do that.

‘Days like Saturday make it all worthwhile and that’s what we’ll be aiming to do again next season.’

Leigh Griffiths, meanwhile, believes Celtic have the resources to continue to dominate domestically as well as making inroads in Europe.

For the first time, Rodgers’ side face four qualifiers to make the group stage of the Champions League this summer before they turn their attention to defending the three trophies they have won in each of the past two seasons.

‘We can do both,’ insisted Griffiths. ‘We proved this season that we can fight on two fronts when we stayed in Europe until after Christmas. Then we had a difficult draw against Zenit St Petersburg but we could just as easily have been paired with someone else and gone through.

‘What we’ve done this year is a great achievement and we’re buzzing about it but the main focus has to be what happens next, so we’ll need to go again.

‘The expectations will be even bigger for us next season as a result of what we’ve achieved.’