The McGregor Injury Affords New Heroes The Chance To Shine At Celtic.

The McGregor injury is bad then. Bad being a relative term, with the full extent of the badness not yet clear to us. But bad. It means what it says on the tin. Not short-term.

The manager hopes that it is not long-term. But it might be.

Even a medium term injury gives us problems, and those problems are going to be experienced in many different ways. Losing the captain of your team is a brutal blow, no matter who he is. There is a reason McGregor is so respected inside Celtic even if there are a lot of our fans who think he’s too soft to hold down the job.

There’s talk about Hart; as a rule I don’t think keepers make good captains because they are often too far from the action. Still, if a squad is full of strong enough characters it tends not to matter.

This Celtic side has big personalities in it.

It is high time those guys came to the fore. We’re going to need them.

Oliver Abildgaard is going to be an obvious beneficiary.

He will now step into the side. But don’t rule out a role for James McCarthy. Don’t rule out Aaron Mooy playing a bigger part. These guys haven’t really had much chance to show us what they can do.

In every crisis though there is an opportunity, and somebody is going to make his name over the next few weeks. Someone is going to make himself a key part of this team and perhaps even give the manager a decision to make when Callum is back fit.

Nobody is playing down the significance of the blow we’ve suffered. Nobody should. But it need not be a fatal one. The guys we’ve signed and the guys we’ve got in this team should be more than capable of filling the hole in the team.

It’s the leadership thing that might be an issue.

Once again, though, that affords someone in the team the chance to step up and be a hero. And someone will.