GARY HARKINS would love to make Celtic Park a regular destination for his Morton team.

The Greenock men put up a good fight in their 3-0 Scottish Cup defeat at the home of the champions, with their midfield

maestro thoroughly enjoying himself.

Morton are third in the Championship and look good for a second play-off place in succession,

And, who knows, the Cappielow team may well return to Parkhead and the other Premiership grounds next season on league business.

Harkins said: "We’re just taking it week by week. We’ve been on a good run, although we had a bad result the other night, but you’ve seen that we can play well when we come to places like this.

“It’s one game at a time though. We’ve got a tough run-in ahead and we’ll just look to finish as high up as we can.

“I’m still ambitious, I want to play at the highest level I can and if I could do that with my hometown club I’d be delighted.

"This club was last in the top league 30 years ago. I was three!

“It would be great to do it but as I say, it’s a tough run-in and the play-offs are tough as well so if we can get there, fingers crossed.

“Listen, there are a lot of boys in that team who are good enough to do it, so they should be looking at themselves and thinking ‘I need to push on, I want to go on and do that’ and kick on from there.

"Hopefully they do that with Morton.”

Jim Duffy has assembled a fine side who for 45 minutes or so frustrated Celtic until the inevitable happened.

Harkins is a lovely footballer and his performance impressed Brendan Rodgers so much the Celtic manager sought out the Morton man after the match.

Harkins said: "I spoke to him, aye. I’m here next season, I think!

“I’ll be cleaning his boots for him.

“He was lovely, you can see with the way he speaks to the press and everything that he carries himself really well and it’s a good pat on the back for me, so I’m happy.”

And Harkins was right to be happy with his and his team's performance.

He said: "We made it tough for them. I thought we played quite well, although we lost a couple of bad goals, but it’s obviously a really tough place to come and we got punished in the end.”

"I think for the whole game we had a wee bit of belief there. You could see the way we played, we caused them some problems.

“Obviously you are going to come here and they will have most of the ball, but we were disciplined, we stuck to our positions and we played when we got it.

“So we always thought we might have a chance but unfortunately it just wasn’t to be.”