CELTIC coach Darren O'Dea hopes that youngsters on the books at Parkhead will take heart from Adam Montgomery's first-team emergence this season under Ange Postecoglou.

The 19-year-old left-back made his senior debut towards the end of the previous campaign but has featured prominently thus far, playing an important role as the Hoops navigated their way through the European qualifiers and often clambering off the bench.

Montgomery faced his stiffest test yet when he started Celtic's 2-0 win over Ferencvaros in the Europa League on Tuesday afternoon and acquitted himself well on the European stage.

Himself a product of the Glasgow club's youth system, O'Dea - who works as part of Tommy McIntyre's coaching staff for Celtic B - knows how vital it is for young players to believe there is a path to first-team football from the academy.

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The former Republic of Ireland internationalist believes that having the kids train alongside the senior players helps to inspire the next generation - alluding to Montgomery as the perfect case in point.

"When the players first come, of course they’ve got big aspirations and they want to conquer the world, if you like," O’Dea told the Celtic website. "But the reality really hits when you come up to Lennoxtown – you’re one pitch away from the first team at all times.

"The first team regularly dip into the B team for training numbers. It usually happens before training but it can happen during training, so they don’t know when the opportunity is going to come, and that realisation of all the talk we did when they were 16 and they first came in, and the big dreams they had – they’re much closer than what they maybe understand.

"They have to be in a rhythm of training every day and being prepared right. I don’t think you’ll get a better example of that than last year with the whole reserve team going up for a two-week period.

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"Now the person who’s stayed there since then is Adam Montgomery. He’s never come back but if you went and watched him train two or three months previous to that and then a month previous to that, he was just constantly in a rhythm of training, doing the right things and when that opportunity came in the most bizarre circumstances, he was there to take advantage of it.

"So it’s a key message for them – those dreams you’re talking about, albeit the step is absolutely huge, it might not be as far away as you think."