Austin Trusty needs a big Celtic summer, and then a good start to the season.

The campaign ahead is going to be a big one for the whole club. I actually think it’s going to be tougher than last season—and that’s saying something.

A lot is going on elsewhere, and several clubs now reckon they’ve got us figured out. If we go into the new season playing the same type of football we did towards the end of the last one, we’re going to get found out. So there must be changes—and not just surface-level stuff either.

Even if that wasn’t the case, this is still going to be a massive campaign for some of the players in the team. Guys like Adam Idah, who signed last season but hasn’t really convinced as many Celtic fans as he should have. Or Arne Engels, the club’s record signing, who has been reasonably good but not brilliant. But I think the guy under the most pressure right now is probably Auston Trusty.

With Idah, at least, you can measure success in goals. It’s there. It’s verifiable. Big Adam has put the ball in the net regularly. You can also measure, by various metrics, how well Arne Engels did in his first campaign. I think he had a solid season—even if he didn’t grab headlines or bring a lot of glitz and glamour. He had pressure instead. Still, there aren’t the same doubts about him as there are about the big striker.

Part of the problem for both of them is that they were expensive. Idah was the record signing, and then Engels came along and broke that. There’s been a determined push—mostly from outside the club—to brand both signings as overpayments. The trouble is, a fair few Celtic fans agree.

And even I, as someone who rates Idah, can see that £9 million was a heavy price and has put a lot of pressure on the guy’s shoulders.

But as I said, you can make a case for both players having done well enough. There’s far less support for the idea that Auston Trusty has proved to be worth the money.

His form has been patchy, at best. He’s been in and out of the team. The one thing Idah and Engels have going for them is that they played regularly. Trusty didn’t. And now, with the signing of Inamura on the brink of completion, people are rightly asking whether his long-term future lies at Celtic—a seemingly ludicrous thought considering we paid £6 million for him just last summer, but actually a legitimate question.

There have been individual games where he looked a proper find. I thought some of his Champions League performances were excellent. But in other matches, he looked, frankly, out of his depth.

He was bullied and intimidated in ways that were almost unforgivable.

Rodgers was known to be highly critical—not of his physicality, which the big man obviously has—but of whether he had the heart, the mindset. That’s worrying. That suggests this might not be an easy fix.

But he’s an expensive player, probably on good wages. We signed him from England, and that doesn’t come cheap. So, whatever the circumstances, we can’t just write him off. He’s part of the first team squad. He will play in a lot of games—because what choice do we have?

Most of us expect the club to bring in another centre-back, but that’s not a done deal. Until it happens, it’s Trusty, Carter-Vickers and Scales as our front-line three. Tierney can play in central defence, at a push, but it’s obviously not his best position—and that leaves us short on the left.

In some ways, Trusty’s benefited from all the attention on Idah and the endless debate about whether his time here has been successful. When people are talking about someone else, they’re not talking about you.

That’s let him off the hook a little bit.

But he can’t be happy with how the season went. He can’t be happy that he hasn’t played more games. When you arrive at a club for £6 million—especially in Scotland, where that’s a major outlay—you expect to be in the team every week.

He played 20 league games last season out of 38. Across all competitions, he played just 30 games in a campaign where we had close to 60. That’s not a great return. He knows it. He knows he needs to improve. This is a big summer for him. In fact, it’s a big summer for a lot of people at the club. But especially for him. He must hit the ground running when the new season starts.

I like the big guy. I think there’s a player there. I think we need to find him. It was too expensive a piece of business to write off.

He’ll get chances. He’ll get another run at it—and he really has to take it. Because in the games where he looked good, he looked really good. He looked like someone who could form a top-class partnership with Carter-Vickers.

But too often, there were slips.

Too often, there were signs that this game—this league—is harder and more competitive than he expected.

And now he’s going to have to adapt fast. Because we simply spent too much money on him to have him sitting on the bench.