Is There A Place For Joe Hart In The Next Evolution Of This Celtic Team?

A football manager doing his job right makes a club into an ever-evolving thing, something that is always either in a phase of transition or is still waiting to find out what the results of the previous one were. This Celtic team is 18 months old. It is still evolving.

Evolution is a rough process. Darwin’s theory has often been called “the survival of the fittest” but in fact this is a misunderstanding of what natural selection means. He meant that the species best able to adapt to changing conditions survives … this wasn’t about being the strongest or fastest but the result of a combination of different factors.

So it is with a good manager’s transformation of his club.

There are few who could properly comprehend it when Alex Ferguson sold the engines of his first great Manchester United side; they marvelled that he would let Ince, Kanchelskis and Hughes all leave without “replacing” them, but he knew exactly what he was doing. He promoted the Neville’s, Beckham, Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes from the youth team and in spite of being told by Alan Hansen “you don’t win anything with kids” he went on to secure a double.

This is one of the reasons Ange told us he doesn’t fall in love with players. Not only because they might move on, but because he might well want to move them on. I’ve been thinking a bit today about what I wrote earlier about Juranovic and Giakoumakis, and I’ll follow that up tomorrow with something, but maybe in some small way they don’t fit his larger plan.

There are other players who will not fit the larger plan.

The one I want to talk about in this piece is Joe Hart. There’s an accepted football wisdom that all great teams are built from the back. Certainly, I can’t remember one that didn’t have a top player between the sticks.

We signed Joe Hart at a time when we needed a high quality keeper with top level experience who had been over the course and won trophies. Hart was an outstanding solution to a difficult problem. At the time. But as this team evolves, is that still the case?

Has Joe Hart done it to the level that’s required? Or are his occasional errors becoming difficult to ignore? I’m sure he’s on good money at Celtic and so we can’t just cut him loose. But should we be looking to give him some competition for his place, the better to cut out some of those daft mistakes he is prone to making?

It’s clear that in spite of being talented that Siegrist has failed to emerge as a proper challenger. Ange would have seen enough before now to consider giving him a run.

Hart hasn’t been terrible, but there are goals I don’t think a keeper of his experience and former level should ever have let get past him and when he tries to play the ball on the deck I think most of us have a collective heart attack. His mistake at Ibrox, where he almost gifted an otherwise anonymous Morelos a goal, was absolutely scandalous.

And it isn’t the first one of those he has made.

I think Hart is a good keeper but as this side evolves being good simply won’t be good enough. Ange wants to see this team develop beyond what he did in the first transfer window, and Joe Hart is a product of that window, and a time when we were throwing the team together in something of a hurry. Ange will already wonder if he can do better.

You look at the players who have evolved along with this team, like Ralston and Taylor, and guys who have come into Ange’s system and just got it right away, and you ask yourself if Hart has regained his standing as a world class keeper (which he once was) or even just improved in the year and a half he’s been here beyond the guy we signed.

The thing about evolution is that when the environment changes – European football replaces domestic football for example – you’ll see who is capable of moving to the next level and who is not, or no longer can. Ange knows what went wrong in the last Champions League campaign, and he’s already busy trying to put it right.

There are a lot of people in this squad who will not survive his first proper evaluation of where we are compared to where he wants us to be, and some of the names on his “not quite making it” list will be surprising ones for many of us.

Where Joe Hart lies in his thinking could be crucial to the plans that emerge.