They say that a week is a long time in politics. It’s true. But Christ, guys, what can we say about a fortnight in football? Can it really be two weeks ago that we lost to Hearts and the media started up the talk of Celtic In Crisis?
Kind of a lot has happened since then, right?
Part of it was simply that the players who were already at the club have spent more time with the manager and gotten used to his ideas. Part of it is that they are just sharpening up, as always happens at the start of a new campaign.
Part of it is having the new players, and very quickly adapting them to the new style of play.
Tomorrow, we play Hearts again.
I’ll be blunt; I thought they were damned lucky to beat us in the league and whilst I have some issues with the way we played and especially with the substitutions I know that if we’d taken our chances – our handful of them – that we’d have won.
I fully expect us to beat them at home, and comfortably.
Because when you see how we have played in the last three games – and in particular that we have scored 13 goals in the process – you see that in the space of those two weeks we’ve become a very different proposition. Starfelt, Hart and Kyogo are part of it, of course, but so too is the fact that the team just looks to have gelled.
It wasn’t just the goals in the last three matches, it was the football. It was the open nature of our attacking, the aggression, the quality of the stuff we played. We created more chances in any one of those games than we usually did in a dozen last season.
And far more than we did in that game at Tynecastle.
If we show up for business the way we have in the last three matches there is no way they’ll be able to live with us. I expect us to blow them out early.
It is hard to believe, looking at it now, that it’s only been two weeks since that day.
The win in the Czech Republic seemed to steady a lot of the nerves.
The perfect performance against Dundee only enhanced the feel-good factor. The midweek game showed us professionally getting the job done in a game where it would have been easy to take a relaxed approach.
All we have to do tomorrow is play our own game and it’ll be another good afternoon’s work.
That will set us nicely for another tough encounter in midweek.