Brendan Rodgers urges Celtic to wrap up title as soon as possible

Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers challenged his team to sprint over the finishing line after they moved 16 points clear of Rangers in the Premiership.

The title race is all but over after Motherwell won at Ibrox and Celtic beat St Mirren 5-2 in an eventful contest in Paisley.

The champions can take a major step towards sealing the treble with victory in their next two home games, against in-form Hibernian in the Scottish Gas Scottish Cup quarter-finals and then Rangers in the league.

The title could even be wrapped up before the end of March and Rodgers aims to get the required points as quickly as possible.

Rodgers said: “I’ve always wanted to sprint over the line in any of the competitions that we’ve been in.

“So we sit in a great position, 16 points clear, with the goal difference, you can say, an extra point. But we’re in a really, really good place, and the players are so deserving of it. But we still have a lot of work to do.

“We want to get into the semi-final, we’ve got a tough game next week. But we’ll be ready for that. And then we want to finish the job in the league as quick as we can.”

Celtic now have a full week to prepare for the visit of Hibs after 10 consecutive midweek games and Rodgers believes they will be stronger for the rest.

St Mirren twice levelled against the league leaders and, with the score 3-2, had a very strong penalty claim rejected in the 87th minute when Alistair Johnston followed through with his studs showing on Roland Idowu.

Substitute Yang Hyun-jun set up Daizen Maeda to net a minute later before heading his second goal of the game in stoppage time.

“I’m just so happy for the players to come through what I mentioned a few months ago would be a very busy, intense period,” Rodgers said.

“That’s the little bit of freshness we will get back now. The freshness in our defending has been a little off. Why? It’s just the sheer amount of games and the players are pushing themselves to the limit, physically and mentally.

“That’s me being super critical because we will get that back now. We can recover and do some work on the training field and going forward with one game a week.

“We’ll be right there with our pressing and our offensive play, which is always at a high level.”

St Mirren manager Stephen Robinson bemoaned the failure to award the penalty and some poor finishing after his side managed 14 shots, half of them on target.

Left-back Declan John scored with a brilliant free-kick and midfielder Killian Phillips volleyed home, but strikers Toyosi Olusanya and Mikael Mandron both had enough chances to hit a hat-trick each.

Robinson said: “We can’t sit and feel sorry for ourselves. As I say, the decision went against us, but they go up the other end and score, we’re in control of that. We stop that and we’re still very much in the game at 3-2.

“There were brilliant performances there over the last month, really, really good performances. We just aren’t clinical enough, we can’t finish teams off when we have chances. Unfortunately, that’s the level we work with.

“We can’t buy a striker for the millions that other people do. That’s why people are in the bottom six, they play good football, they do lots of good things. But scoring goals and defending your box wins and loses games.”