Celtic centre-back Christopher Jullien has revealed he drove his loved ones mad whilst watching Hoops games as he recovered from long-term injury.
The imposing French stopper cemented himself as an crucial first-team pick for the Parkhead club in his first season in Glasgow, as he helped Neil Lennon and his team-mates clinch a ninth consecutive Premiership title.
This season, however, has been an altogether different story, with Jullien forced to watch from the sidelines as Steven Gerrard's Rangers romped to the championship, leaving Celtic a whopping 25 points in their wake.
Jullien has been out injured since December after colliding with the post in a win over Dundee United, and managed just nine league appearances in total throughout the 2020/21 campaign.
And as he looks ahead to next season, the 28-year-old has been reflecting on one of the most difficult years of his career.
Speaking to the Celtic View podcast, he said: "Seriously, my family was crazy when they were watching me watching the games.
"Either I’d be talking too much or I couldn’t watch some moments in the game because it was stressing me so much.
"It’s good to see the team when they have good moments, but when it’s a little bit more difficult, it’s sometimes a little bit difficult to watch.
"The goal now is to be back with the team for pre-season and I’ll do my best to do this.
"Week after week you can see the improvement and my goal right now is just to get my strength back. I’m just really happy to be back at Celtic and we’ll put a calendar on everything and just focus every week on what we’re going to do to get to the best point when I can come back with the team.
"I can’t wait to have that. It’s going to be strange because it’s been a long time. When you go from being with your team-mates every day and then you don’t see them for three-and-a-half months, it’s just so strange, so I can’t wait to see my guys and be there on the field with them and share some moments.
"At the moment when I got injured, I remember Odsonne coming up to me and saying, ‘Chris, don’t worry. It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.’
"I was devastated. Every time in my career when I’ve had a little injury, I always thought I would come back really fast.
"The first thing I said to him was that I was going to miss the Rangers game. It was a really important game that could have put our season on the other side, so to miss that was really difficult in my mind. And then to miss all the rest of the games was so painful.
"So to have those ups and downs – I missed about a month and a half because of my back, and then I came back, I was feeling good, we won the trophy (the 2020 Scottish Cup) and everything was really good and I was thinking the season was coming and we would be coming back."
