Three points yesterday from Celtic, but more; it was the second half performance we wanted.

Yesterday we were excellent in the second half; that was the Celtic we’d been watching all season, and we really ought to have got more than just the four goals that we finished it with. The football was back on point. The movement off the ball was excellent. On top of that, we saw some standout performances.

The best of them, I thought, belonged to Arne Engels and it was good that the match sponsors or whoever it is who decides these things thought so as well in giving him the award. He earned it. I thought it was a great display from him, not just in getting forward and assisting the attacks but in helping out Callum as well.

A lot of us have been saying that the midfield three who started yesterday’s game are our best; on the evidence of that it is hard to disagree with them. Bernardo, McGregor and Engels is a midfield trio which just has a solid look and feel to it.

On the podcast earlier in the week we also talked about how good an “impact sub” Hatate can be; he too proved that and took his goal brilliantly. He can be really effective coming on in a second half where the opposition are tired and living on their nerves. It also takes some of the pressure off Reo himself, because he’s been under a white-hot spotlight of late and it does him good to be out of that for a spell.

And you could tell, because he was great when he came on.

All the news was good yesterday. Including results elsewhere, which I am going to get to – and with great pleasure – a little later on. The injured players are almost all back in the squad; AJ is the exception and he’s near enough it that Rodgers confirmed that he could be back for Sunday.

The worry, of course, was Kuhn, and that’s no longer an issue because he wasn’t just back but was back on the score-sheet after coming on. The only fly in the ointment, if you were looking for a reason to quibble, is that none of our strikers has gotten on the score-sheet, unless you are counting Maeda, who is having a storming campaign.

The forwards don’t deserve some of the stick they are getting. Rodgers has devised a system which spreads the goals throughout the team and that, to me, is a positive. You look at the goal difference column and you see that we’re battering them in, and it can look a bit incongruous when you see that our two main forwards aren’t both on double figures, but this is one of the secrets of our success in this system.

As fans we do want to see our heroes score (my own favourite player did, so I’m good anyway), but it’s the team that matters most and that’s where I don’t get too bent out of shape when the strikers aren’t banging them away. As long as the team is doing it, I don’t think we can complain all that much.

It was a good afternoon’s work, the sort of performance in that second half that we wanted to see. I didn’t think we were particularly bad in the first either; we just lacked that killer instinct against another packed defence, until we got the spot kick and although Stewart Kettlewell was moaning about that it’s a stonewall one as far as I’m concerned and all he’s doing is kidding himself on.

Once we got the first there was never any doubt that the second would come. Teams who put eleven men behind the ball get found out the minute you get an opener because once you’ve conceded a goal when the objective you’ve been striving towards is not to do that then what’s left? What’s Plan B? If we had gotten a goal in Dundee I have little doubt there would have been more than one. Sometimes the patience pays off.

It did yesterday, and we’ve put three more points away and put four more goals into the account. That’s a good day’s work from all concerned. What happened a little later on, just up the road in Paisley, only made it that bit sweeter.