Sutton Is Right. Kyogo, And Celtic, Will Massively Benefit From Hatate’s Return.

Celtic needs to get its act together to win this title.

We all know it. In order to stand the best chance of doing so, we pretty much need to have our best players available between now and the final game.

Obviously, we’re all worried about McGregor and Ibrox … but Ibrox is just one game, and McGregor is just one player. There’s also Reo Hatate to think about.

There’s a weird phenomenon in football, which is that certain players appear better the longer they are out of the team. If you’re in a tailspin you can look at the options on the bench or in the stands and convince yourself pretty easily that the answer is sitting there somewhere.

One of the great examples of that was Bobo Balde, about whom a lot of pressure was put on Gordon Strachan at one point.

If memory serves me, his benching was as much about his decision to stay after a £1.5 million bid was submitted for him, which he turned down, as it was about his talents; he was a good servant for our club, but on his own could not have arrested the decline.

Reo Hatate is exactly the inverse of this, and I find that astonishing.

I’ve spoken to people who tell me that he’s over-rated anyway and won’t make a huge difference to the team. It’s jaw dropping to hear that.

It seems he’s become a less influential player the longer he’s been out of the team … they want to look at the collapse in our game since, and whilst we can’t draw a direct line between one and the other it’s obvious that we’re not as good.

Chris Sutton spoke about Hatate the other day, and for the first time in a while I could not find a thing in his comments with which I disagree. We have, at the tip of the spear, the most intelligent player in Scottish football. Kyogo is always looking for that bit of space which he can exploit, and you see him run into that space, those tiny areas, over and over again.

The problems with his form earlier in the season were not just about him.

The problem is that in order to see him at his best, you need players around him with that matching intelligence. That ability to spot where he’s moving to and the ability to dink the ball right on top of the spot he’s moving for. That requires a certain synchronicity.

Hatate is one of the players who can see that space at almost the moment Kyogo can and trust him to move into it.

Kyogo knows what Hatate is looking for the minute he gets the ball, and so do other players and you see them respond to it, moving up-field and looking for space to give him that option … we miss that so much, not just the quality he has on the ball but that vision, that intelligence, and that’s why his return is so exciting and might be game-changing.

The key thing is what we do with him against Livingston.

He has to play at some stage if he’s going to be fit for Ibrox. It’s not even up for debate that we need him at that ground, and the sharper the better.

He really might be the guy who tips this title race back towards us.