For Those Chasing Celtic, The Latest “Oh My God” Moment Arrived This Weekend.

Evolution is important. Ibrox’s failure to evolve either its team or its fans has them on the precipice of a chaotic and dangerous summer. Celtic thrives right now because it’s constantly moving forward and Ange has instilled that into the team. He talks not about an end point but about never setting one because eventually that would break the momentum.

Looking at where this club was this time last season and where it is now, you can see the progress and how we’ve come along. The guy who was heading for the top of the SPFL scoring charts is no longer in the building; none of us would have predicted that then. The Croatian right back who was such a fine signing, has already gone too. These moves would once have generated shockwaves. In point of fact, this club has only grown stronger.

There is a simplicity to what Ange Postecoglou has done here which if you’d explained it to people at the start, or tried to, they would never have believed that it could achieve success, so straightforward is it, at least on the surface.

Sign players to perform certain roles. Don’t put square pegs in round holes. Have enough quality in the squad that you can rotate. But make sure that when you are signing a striker you don’t sign the same type of player as the one you’ve got already. Because if you have different skill-sets then if something isn’t working you’re not making a like-for-like substitution but fundamentally changing the way the team approaches the game.

This is elementary stuff, or it seems to be. Actually, it’s got all the complexity of a symphony. It takes a certain critical eye to see where all the pieces fit. A very special talent is required.

There are all sorts of things in this life which look easy, enough so that people who really shouldn’t be attempting them have tried to. Writing is one of them. On the surface of it, this is merely the act of putting words onto a page, and anyone can do that.

But we’ve all read Kris Boyd and Keevins and the output from Glasgow Live and so we know that there’s a Hell of a lot more to it than that. Their work is to real writing what elevator music is to a world class orchestra at the top of its game.

Equally, anyone can hang a painting or lay slabs or put up a garden shed. And the world of full of half-finished, half-assed jobs to demonstrate how difficult it really is, and that’s what this football management gig is like.

Ange just makes it look simple, the way a good musician can write a chart-topping song in a shockingly short span of time; Noel Gallagher has talked about writing Supersonic in ten minutes. Michael Stipe wrote Losing My Religion just as fast. Sweet Child Of Mine was allegedly written in five. For that skill-set none of that is especially remarkable.

In a season characterised by great leaps forward, I think we saw a very important one this weekend and so did the rest of Scottish football. Our big striker Oh scored our second, and he did so in such a way that no other player in our team would have. Giakoumakis wouldn’t have scored that goal, because although he was a big lad he never struck me as one with that sort of physicality, which surprised me more the more I watched him.

Our whole game pivoted on the moment Oh was introduced. Their defence had coped with each and every effort we made to break them down. It was his coming on which put the fear of God into them, and chipped away at their shape. From the second he took up his position they didn’t seem to know how to act, and they had several warnings at dead balls that he was on the prowl and presented a different sort of threat.

We didn’t have that in the locker before we signed him. He gives us a new, and dangerous, element. He allows us to change up our style of play, although the onus continues to be on attacking football played the right way. He’s a more cultured player than some big bruiser would be, but he can do that job if that job is what’s required and it was required at the weekend and he duly came up with the goods. And that should worry every team in this league.

All of them now play the same way against us, and none of them has been able really to lay a glove on us. But some of them have come close to nicking points they didn’t deserve. Hibs, although down to ten men, probably thought they would … and then Ange made the switch, seeing it clearly, and not just in the personnel but in everything.

Look at the radically different way we worked corner kicks after his introduction. We started putting the ball into the box, to look for him, rather than playing the short corner passing moves we had been struggling to get traction with … our style changed ever so slightly and it paid dividends. That’s a triumph which should be laid at the door of the boss himself.

This was a big weekend. It was another step, albeit small, albeit largely uncommented on in our awful, bog-standard media, in our evolution. It’s just another advance that makes us that little bit better than we were, which of course moves us that little bit further ahead of the rest. That’s a small thing but it’s also everything.