Hatate’s Possible Return Makes Celtic Fans Happy. But Are We Risking Another Mistake?

Yesterday we got something that might be construed as positive news on the injury front. God knows we’ve needed some. Reo Hatate might well be fit and back in the Celtic team by Ibrox. He will be back in training soon. From there it’s a straightforward path to the first team. Good news, right? Just what we’ve been waiting to hear.

But is it really? We look at the squad right now and it would certainly be good to have him back in the side, especially with McGregor out and real questions about when he might return. To have them both in the team at the same time seems almost too good to be true. Will it actually happen? We can hope for it, but wonder if we’ll see it this season.

Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? This injury crisis of ours shows no signs of abating, with Palma the latest to go down, and uncertainty still over McGregor and Carter Vickers. It’s Carter Vickers, more than the captain, who worries me here and not on account of the length of time he’s going to be out for (although obviously I am very worried over that) … no, the question that haunts me is this; did he get injured, again, because we rushed him into the team too soon?

I wrote about this before his recall. That I hoped we weren’t doing exactly that, that we wouldn’t live to regret it. I don’t know whether the two things are related – throwing him right back in and his getting injured again so quickly – or whether this is a case of informal fallacy (after it therefore because of it) which just makes me think it is, but it’s very obvious that doing that carried huge risks and it’s equally clear that putting Hatate in too soon would carry the same ones.

I think that’s why Hatate’s second injury was worse than the first; he was rushed back too early, when he still wasn’t 100%. If this is how our medical team does things peoples heads should roll there. The costs might be enormous.

Obviously, we all want Hatate back. The team does not look the same without the key players, it’s one of the reasons this season has unravelled. If you have good enough footballers in backup to step in for these guys that’s one thing, but we very obviously don’t and I understand that with the title race so close that people are desperate for the return of these players … but in our desperation and that of the manager to get his best out there we might be making matters worse.

At some point thoughts have to turn to the summer. We would obviously not want anyone out for a length of time which might not see them fit before pre-season. That’s the nightmare scenario, and in particular as regards Kyogo. An injury to his shoulder will put him on the sidelines for four months; if he went down now it’s conceivable that he’d be back for pre-season training. If he goes down in pre-season we won’t see him the rest of the year.

If we haven’t finished top of the league, we’ve got qualifiers to play where the stakes couldn’t be higher. The aim should be to make sure that the first team squad is all available just in case, and to make sure that we’re as ready as we can be for everything next season will bring.

This doesn’t mean we’re writing off this campaign; nobody will do that, including us as fans. We’re still very much in this, with a two point gap which we’re more than capable of clawing back. But we don’t want to do anything at this point which is going to make things harder for us later on.